This newspaper has many recollections of frustrating encounters with high officials of government and senior public servants in the course of trying to secure a comment or perhaps a piece of relevant information that might help in the development of a story.
Government does this all the time. It withholds or releases information utilizing media, language and timing of its own choosing. The first thing it has in mind is how its management of information dissemination impacts on its image-shaping pursuits. The public right to know and its right to accurate information is usually a secondary matter.
Of course, some media houses, particularly the state-controlled ones, are much better positioned to access official information. Sometimes, whether or not you get a helpful response to a request for a comment or a clarification might depend on which Minister or public official you ask. Unlike in some other countries where free media mean, among other things, a relationship of mutual respect and mutual regard for each other’s role, between politicians and journalists, here in Guyana you can just as easily be cold-shouldered or ‘dissed’ by one high official as you might be cordially engaged by another.
Here it might be the case that some Ministers are ‘media shy,’ an oft-used euphemism for not trusting themselves to engage the media, as was the case with a particular Minister earlier this year, who, having initially agreed to speak on an issue, ended up referring the journalist to a GINA pronouncement on the particular matter which offered little help in pursuit of the story in question.
Our experience has been that there is no universal rule of thumb when it comes to accessing official information from Ministers and high officials of government in Guyana. Some are clearly much more on top of their portfolios than others and – at least so it appears – the prerogative of engaging the media is afforded some and denied others. There are those, too, who avoid engaging the media on the grounds of the fear of being misquoted. The best that can be said about that excuse is that it is time-worn, trite and tasteless.
The official dissemination of state information has become increasingly centralized over time. Media releases from individual Ministries and other state agencies are still issued but on the whole the major official sources of information are GINA and the Head of the Presidential Secretariat. The particular advantage to be derived from this information management system has to do with government’s ability to both fashion and rehearse the message before it is disseminated. It worries over the likelihood of dissonance affecting the way in which the message is received. Here, the point should be that official filtering or distillation of information occurs primarily in cases where there is a lack of trust between government and media and when government, mindful in the first instance of its own image, seeks as far as possible, to influence both the form and content of information that is placed in the public domain.
It is worth repeating that the advantage of government’s chosen forms of information dissemination is the facility that those means allow for prior vetting and/or rehearsal. Whilst all too frequently journalists are accused of not pursuing their investigative obligations with sufficient tenacity it is often forgotten that it is Ministers and high officials who must be targeted in journalists’ investigative pursuits. There are almost certainly many more incomplete stories arising out of the official suppression of information than out of professional delinquency on the part of journalists.
Ministerial sources of information aside, there are those potentially useful (sometimes, off the record) discourses that journalists might commonly have with senior and/or well-place public functionaries that can help in the development of background and context when developing stories. This is a practice that is very much in evidence in countries that encourage media freedom and embrace the public’s right to know. By contrast, here in Guyana, public servants routinely speak openly about fear of official reprisal were it to be discovered that they are engaging the media.
There are times when some of our Permanent Secretaries and Heads of state entities appear decidedly uncertain as to whether or not they are authorised to speak and even when they may be authorised to do so they appear terrified by the prospect of saying the wrong thing.
Encounters with these officials can sometimes be occasions of considerable awkwardness, even absurdity like the occasion some months ago when this newspaper asked a Permanent Secretary to facilitate the transmission of a copy of an entirely public document only to be told that the Minister would have to sanction the granting of that request. On a more recent occasion we sought a comment from a senior public official on an incident which had been reported days earlier in several sections of the media only to be told by the official that as far as he was aware no such incident had ever taken place. After we had provided him with conclusive evidence that the incident had occurred the official simply refused to speak with us any further.
Efforts by the political directorate to exert control over all of the channels through which state information gets placed in the public domain are designed solely to manipulate and manage the message. One reason why the Head of the Presidential Secretariat speaks for the government is because of his role in clothing messages in what the government considers to be appropriate language. All too frequently this approach leads to mixed messages, even confusion, which, sometimes, is exactly what the sender of the message wants.
It makes for a pretty unhealthy situation as far as media freedom and the public’s right to know are concerned but then it is media manipulation rather than media freedom that is the official priority.
