An editorial in today’s Trinidad Express has strongly criticized the government of President Bharrat Jagdeo over the suspension of CNS Channel. The editorial is reprinted below.
Guyana govt attack on media freedom
THE government of outgoing Guyana President Bharrat Jagdeo has earned hardly any credit for its decision to postpone the suspension of the CN Sharma TV channel until after that country’s November 28 national elections. The suspension imposed on the privately-owned channel, shocking when it was first declared, before announcement of the election date, certainly remains scandalous in the eyes of everyone everywhere, with a decent respect for the fundamental freedom of expression and freedom of the press.
President Jagdeo’s decision last week to suspend the suspension conveys scant cause for comfort. Nor does it give rise to any satisfaction that his administration could have seen the error of its ways.
For its impact, significance, and timing, the presidential order taking the channel off the air drew predictable international and regional outrage. Such responses were compounded by the realisation that the Jagdeo regime could so presume to suppress operation of a free medium at a time when the alleged grounds of the suspension are matters of a continuing court case.
Moreover, the proprietor of the channel (the victim also of an earlier suspension) has been before and was expected this time around to be a presidential candidate. Action by the People’s Progressive Party (PPP)-controlled state to deprive him of a media voice was inevitably and legitimately also seen as political victimisation.
The double-edged crackdown — against the media and the political opposition — has drawn attention to the essentially dire conditions applying to Guyanese media houses seeking to exercise their right to freedom. The Guyanese government has shown itself capable of projecting a vengeful and oppressive attitude against those media neither under its control nor its influence.
Notoriously, the government has sought to punish disfavoured media houses through State advertising boycotts. Such damnable discrimination in the use of public funds has at various times targeted two privately owned daily newspapers.
The free media nowhere can be assumed to be wholly blameless in its operations, and must remain as open to questioning and to criticism as are politicians, parties and governments. Still, the Guyana Press Association and the Association of Caribbean Media Workers understandably drew the line at President Jagdeo’s condemnation of Guyanese journalists as “vultures and carrion crows”.
The two associations saw in such “inflammatory” attacks the potential to “endanger the lives of media practitioners and their families…by inciting hatred and violence.” For such characterisation comes close to explicit identification of media houses with the political opposition. Before it gets too late, President Jagdeo should disavow any such intent on behalf of his still-ruling party.
Failing which, as he should know, Guyanese voters could and should insist that the 19-year-old PPP administration pay an appropriate electoral price for such abuses of media and other freedoms, perpetrated in the face of disgust and protest in the region and around the world.