What might be considered a minor contretemps in the National Assembly on Wednesday could have more serious implications. Attorney General Basil Williams was at pains to persuade Speaker of the House, Dr Barton Scotland, to sanction a member of the media who he said had misrepresented his presentation in Parliament thereby misleading the nation. The Speaker, it transpired, was not of a mind to move then and postponed a decision, sagely remarking that “all freedoms are subject to limitations… freedoms are always associated with obligations. Sometimes what we do is we emphasize the freedom and ignore the obligations that go with those freedoms; the press is also obliged to at least be truthful.”
As we reported on Thursday, the issue arose out of a news story by Ms Vanessa Narine which was carried by the online media organization called Citizens Report. It related to an exchange two days earlier, between the current AG and Mr Anil Nandlall, in the course of the debate on the Budget Estimates. Mr Williams maintained that Ms Narine had suggested he had misled the National Assembly by alleging fraud in a matter concerning a vehicle, but had not recited the details of the fraud.
In fact, he asserted, he had supplied these details in answer to a question by Mr Nandlall, and we quoted him as elaborating as follows: “…the Attorney General said he was able to prevent the government from being defrauded by refusing to accept an old vehicle that was being passed off as a new vehicle.” He then moved on to claim that since his response to Mr Nandlall had not been included in the story, it was “deliberately libellous and calculated to deceive.”
As a consequence, Mr Williams requested the Speaker to sanction Ms Narine, and asked that he be issued with an apology and the report which had been published be corrected. “I’m asking that action be taken against this scandalous and wanton attempt,” he said; “If you cannot take the facts in this House, then what you need to do is leave the House; you cannot take it on yourself to spread lies.” In other words, he appeared to be implying that the offending writer should be excluded from the House, although whether on a temporary or permanent basis is not clear.
A clearly agitated Ms Gail Teixeira, the PPP Chief Whip, vociferously supported by her colleagues, was not at all impressed by Mr Williams’s tale of how Ms Narine had done him wrong. She wasted no time in accusing him of attempting to “control or muzzle” the press, and laid stress on the importance of freedom of expression. “As you know,” we quoted her as telling the House, “when we [PPP/C] were in government, we were under attack by several hostile media, but we have never used the Parliament or the embarrassment of the reporters of those agencies sitting in the House in such an undignified way.”
While it is true that the previous government never used Parliament as an instrument to castigate reporters, Ms Teixeira is skirting the truth if she seeks to asseverate that it never attempted to control the press. Stabroek News in particular, found itself a target, first when Bank of Guyana advertisements were withdrawn ‒ although they were later restored ‒ and then when for seventeen months the Jagdeo government withheld all government advertisements in a futile attempt to drive this newspaper out of the market to provide an entrée for the Guyana Times. Subsequent to that, government advertising was withdrawn from all the private newspapers for a time. In addition, of course, reporter Mr Gordon Moseley was debarred by Mr Jagdeo from admission to all presidential events because of a letter he wrote.
That said, there is a larger matter of principle involved here, even assuming Citizens Report was guilty of misrepresentation, and even if it is acknowledged that that particular organization is widely perceived as being aligned to the PPP – something which no doubt gave Ms Teixeira added reason for animation. The National Assembly is the highest debating forum in the land where proposed legislation and matters relating to governance are considered; it is not a secret chamber where discussions are classified and decisions are confidential. It is absolutely essential that the public – including reporters – have access to the chamber, and that they not be barred, absent some truly wild behaviour like dancing a jig on the Speaker’s lectern and things of that ilk.
Mr Williams, of course, is new to the post, otherwise he might have been aware that this is far from being the first time a minister has been ‘misreported’, both by omission and commission, although the public would be hard put to it to recall earlier cases. In this instance too, whatever was in Ms Narine’s story about the AG and the car, it washed over citizens without registering. In any case, what goes on the permanent record is most certainly not what was contained in Citizens Report, but what is in Hansard. Any future researcher, therefore, avid to find out what Guyana’s Attorney General said about saving the government from being defrauded on a car, is going to have reference to the official parliamentary record, not some ephemeral secondary source in the form of a website.
Governments in general and ministers in particular, will find themselves the focus of all kinds of criticism and comment, some of it merited and some of it not merited. But unfortunately that goes with the democratic turf. And as said above, sometimes their words will be misrepresented too. However, not every barb or misrepresentation is worthy of a response, and ministers have to acquire a feel for what is best ignored, and what is deserving of a riposte or a statement. In this instance, parliamentary time should not have been wasted on Mr Williams’s issue, when he had the option of writing to Citizens Report asking for an apology and a correction; if it is something he feels strongly enough about of course, he could always have recourse to the courts.
What the Speaker had to say about the responsibilities of the press is perfectly true, of course; however, mistakes will sometimes be made and at other times there will be instances of incompetence as well as blunders caused by lack of training. However, these things will not be put right by excluding a writer from the House. Apart from anything else, in this day and age anyone who is debarred from the National Assembly could sit in front of the TV, watch some of the parliamentary proceedings, misreport them and then post them on a blog, and there isn’t too much the AG could do about it.
What one doesn’t want is the setting of a precedent, whereby the Parliament starts excluding reporters because one or another MP or minister believes they have misled the public by their news stories. That would be to try and muzzle the press and freedom of expression, which no one needs to tell Mr Williams is unconstitutional.
