Last week the Tourism and Hospitality Association (THAG) President, Ms Renata Chuck-A-Sang in her report to the 16th Annual General Meeting of the organization, expressed regret that Guyana suffered from an over-inflated negative perception of crime spiralling out of control. She was reported as telling her audience: “We who live here may know and feel differently, but this perception continues to be fuelled by our newspapers that feature incidents of violence on their front pages, with no attempt to balance their reporting. This kind of reporting is seen every day, especially by the millions in the diaspora.” She went on to say that the good stories which happened often went unnoticed, and that this “negative perception is fast becoming a reality.”
The THAG President adverted to the British, Canadian and US advisories which followed the Lusignan and Bartica killings, and said that her organization had met with the British High Commission seeking a review of theirs. That advisory, she went on, had directly targeted members’ resorts in the Essequibo River, and had been particularly damaging. However, she told the meeting, the association had been successful in its intervention.
Ms Chuck-A-Sang is not the only one to wish to have crime swept off the front pages of the dailies and relegated – if carried at all – to obscure sections of the newspapers. The government has long wanted the same thing, if not quite for the same reason; in their case it is a question of not wishing to project an image of failure on the security front. The first thing that must be said is that we, for example, are not a publicity arm of the tourism industry any more than we serve as a propaganda unit for the government.
We have a responsibility to our readers which goes way beyond such narrow or partisan concerns.
Whatever Ms Chuck-A-Sang meant by saying that “negative perceptions” were fast becoming a “reality,” there is no doubt that the public perception is that security is a major problem here. Furthermore, whatever she might choose to believe, it is simply not a false perception. How could it be, considering the barbaric crimes which have been committed in recent times – from Agricola to Lusignan to Bartica – all of them within a fairly limited area, geographically speaking, and in a total population of less than a million people. And that doesn’t take into account the plethora of gun crimes which take place with such regularity. Aside from the fact that the evidence undoubtedly suggests the society is awash with guns which the police have been patently unable to do anything about, we also have one, or more likely two, ruthless gangs armed with AK-47s, which have not been apprehended, and which could, therefore, strike at any time for reasons unknown.
No, we repeat, the problem is not a perception of crime, but crime itself. It would not matter on which page we buried our crime stories, citizens along the coast would still feel unsafe – and with good reason. Furthermore, if the subject of crime disappeared from the newspapers, what pressure would be brought on the government to do anything about the problem? The newspapers, along with many other sectors of the society have played their part in trying to exert pressure to get some improvement in the performance of the security services. Surely Ms Chuck-A-Sang does not have a quarrel with that?
It is interesting that the THAG President homed in on the Bartica case, primarily because, as said above, foreign advisories were issued which did great damage to the resorts in the Essequibo. But let us be realistic: supposing, for the sake of argument, we had carried a truncated version of the Bartica story on page 23, say, does THAG seriously believe that the embassies concerned would not have known about it in a small society like this, and they would not have issued advisories? These were a consequence of what happened, not of any front-page story giving a distorted “perception.”
And Ms Chuck-A-Sang said nothing about television, which by and large has far more lurid coverage of crime that what appears in the newspapers. Is she suggesting, therefore, that the dailies suppress the news that is of most concern to the populace, but that TV newscasts be allowed to continue without the same kind of self-censorship? Of course, she is naturally concerned about the diaspora – potential tourists – which she presumably feels will be particularly affected by the dailies. However, it should be pointed out that overseas Guyanese read their local newspapers for the most part online, where the front-page impact is much diminished, and where they click on any story anywhere which catches their attention. In their case, therefore, it wouldn’t matter too much where the story was placed.
Finally, the THAG President claimed that “good stories” went unnoticed and there was unbalanced reporting. With regard to the first, it was not clear if she intended that they were not reported, or if they were reported but were “unnoticed” by the public. If the latter, it is not within the power of any newspaper to do anything about this, and if the former, it is certainly not true that we do not report them (and on the front page too). As for her second allegation, she adduced no evidence whatsoever to demonstrate unbalanced reporting on a regular basis. It was not a responsible accusation.
Now it may be she could argue that only portions of the coastal strip are under security stress, and the resorts are in a different world. (The violence in areas like Kingston, Jamaica, for example, has never affected tourism in resorts such as those in Montego Bay, despite the fact the press there runs crime stories routinely on its front pages.) If so, however, then the onus is on the tourism industry to find imaginative ways of promoting its product, not on a newspaper to abandon it’s obligations to its readership for the sake of a segment of the business community. In the end, THAG’s interest is the same as everyone else’s: reduce crime, not the stories about crime.
