Dear Editor,

The ‘Editor’s note’ in response to my letter ‘SN does not practice what it preaches’ is not acceptable. In your note you state the following – “CADRES did not reveal who had commissioned the poll on Thursday night, other than to say that it had been privately commissioned (SN, June 6).

Try as I might, I cannot understand how a major media organization such as Stabroek News would receive something as significant as polling results without asking the ‘supplier’ some basic questions about the client. Stabroek News has been in the news business too long to claim that it simply accepted CADRES’ refusal to name the client.

I urge Stabroek News to do the following: (1) impress upon CADRES that it must reveal the ‘party’ that commissioned the poll; and (2) since the end-use client and the funder of the poll might be different, Stabroek News must also provide information about who paid for the survey.

Further, since CADRES is a foreign organization, Stabroek News must clarify if the end-user and the funder (if indeed they are different) are Guyanese. If they are not, then CADRES is interfering in the internal affairs of Guyana.

I received a call yesterday at about 10.45am from Ms Benjamin of Stabroek News who reiterated the position of the newspaper regarding the CADRES poll. Notwithstanding that phone call, my questions still stand.

Yours faithfully,
Randy Persaud

Editor’s note

Dr Persaud has omitted to quote the section of the editor’s note dealing with the response from CADRES Director of Research Peter Wickham about who had commissioned the poll. Sunday Editor Anna Benjamin repeated this portion of the note to him in the telephone conversation he cites above. Nevertheless, we will say again that Mr Wickham told us it was a client’s decision whether they identified themselves or not as having commissioned a poll, and in this instance they did not wish their identity to be known. Most clients, he told us, preferred their names not to be revealed. However, he did say that the poll had not been commissioned by any of the political parties in Guyana or their leaders.

Since CADRES has declined to disclose who commissioned the poll, there is no point in pursuing the matter of funding – if indeed the funder and commissioner are two separate entities, which has not been indicated.

As for CADRES being a “foreign organization,” it is standard practice for ‘foreign’ polling organizations to conduct polls in normal democracies, Trinidad and Tobago being a case in point. In any case, CADRES is based in a Caricom state and does not even come from outside the region. An opinion poll is just that: a barometer of an electorate’s views at a particular point in time, and it is difficult to see how Dr Persaud could possibly regard that as “interfering in the internal affairs of Guyana.”