Dear Editor,
I am replying to the editor’s note attached to a letter by Dr Anand Daljeet of Canada who suggested that the Stabroek News and Kaieteur News adopt a protocol for the publication of polls. In that note, it was stated that such a protocol existed for the 2006 elections. I hold no brief for the Kaieteur News and this letter is in no way a defence of the Kaieteur News; I have no authority to speak for the Kaieteur News. But in fairness to that newspaper it did not publish the so-called polls of Mr Bisram before August 2009. And to date, it only carried a small part of the so-called July survey of Mr. Bisram that stated that Mr Donald Ramotar was one of those persons viewed as a suitable candidate for the PPP’s presidential slot in 2011
I hope Stabroek News take my criticism in good spirit because as I stated above if we are going to examine the adherence to the protocol about the publication of poll then our attention has to be directed to the Stabroek News. Before we get to that, let us look at the July survey that Mr Bisram said he did. In this letter here I have permission from Mr Adam Harris to quote what he told me and gave me. I asked Mr Harris about the survey that the Stabroek News published from Mr Bisram. Harris informed me that a week before the publication of the Stabroek News’ item on Bisram’s finding about Jagdeo and Ramsammy, he was in receipt of three e-mails sent by Mr Vishu Bisram in his name marked “press release.” The three e-mails detailed three aspects of a poll that Mr Bisram said he had done in July in Guyana. Mr Harris sent me the three press releases.
Surely then, the Stabroek News was not following the protocol it accepted when it published that so-called July project of Mr Bisram. I told Harris that it was not good newspaper policy for the Kaieteur News to have published even the section of Mr Bisram’s findings that it printed based on a mere e-mail sent by this gentleman. I now come to the protocol proper. The revelation by the Stabroek News that there was a poll protocol will definitely put to rest the fictions of Mr Bisram once SN and KN scrupulously, meticulously and professionally adhere to the requirements of the protocol. As Dr Daljeet suggested and as the protocol embodies, there must be verifiable knowledge of the organization conducting the poll. The newspapers and the public should know about the leadership and/or directorship of the polling institution and specific details about its location. Its field officers should be made public. How the samples are arrived at should be outlined and most importantly, who funds the poll. This is called the transparency process.
There is no point going back to 2006 because we cannot reverse what happened but it needs to be briefly said that Stabroek did not carry out the requirements of the protocol because if it did then it would have known that the organization that Mr Bisram says he does the polling for is a fiction. It does not exist. The same Bisram wrote that this entity has been conducting operations around the world for twenty years.
That being so it had to have a track record that could have been scrutinized. It does not appear that this was done by SN but let’s move on.
We are coming up to the 2011 elections and I will ask by way of this letter that both the SN and KN stick to the protocol. Finally, I have forwarded to both SN and KN the e-mail sent to me by Mr Ramdin, Assistant General Secretary of the OAS on my question as to whether the polling activities of Mr Bisram were subject to a discussion at the OAS-sponsored Peer Review meeting in May this year on election campaign financing. For readers’ benefit, he said he is travelling in South America and will answer my question when he returns to his office. Mr Annan Boodram wrote in SN that Mr Ramdin assured him that no such discussion took place. Why then in that e-mail to me, he did he not confirm what he told Boodram? Why wait to answer my question when according to Boodram, he answered it already?
Yours faithfully,
Frederick Kissoon
Editor’s note:
As we said in our earlier note to Mr Daljeet’s letter, we had published for the July, 2006 polls information on the origins of Mr Bisram’s polling activities and methodological details. Since we had part-commissioned his polls in the past we felt this was necessary for our readers. We did not play a role in this most recent poll and published news items based on press releases sent by Mr Bisram to all media houses. In publishing the findings, we relied on the pre-existing assurances that Mr Bisram had provided to us and, importantly, on his track record as a pollster.
