While charging that censorship is very much alive in Guyana, PPP General Secretary Clement Rohee on Monday expressed concern over the party’s statements not being carried by the daily newspapers.
“Increasingly, persons of various political hues and shades are voicing their concerns and reservations over the role and content of the state-controlled Chronicle newspaper. Press censorship is being driven from the office of the Prime Minister in particular and the Ministry of Presidency in general; the vehement denials notwithstanding,” Rohee said, while reading from a prepared statement at the PPP’s weekly press conference at Freedom House.
This statement was the only one read at the press conference.
“The People’s Progressive Party is the only political Party that hosts a weekly press conference at which one or two press statements are read and subjected to questioning by journalists present. The statements are promptly sent electronically to all media houses. Off-the statement questions are encouraged at Party press conferences. Quite often, it is the off-the statement responses to questions posed by journalists that are carried in certain sections of the media and not the contents of the official press statement,” he said.
According to Rohee, apart from statements read at press conferences, press releases are issued in between press conferences. These statements, he added, are usually either edited or never published by the Guyana Chronicle, the Kaieteur News or the Stabroek News.
“This is a truth which none of the editors of these newspapers can deny and a fact which they don’t seem to have the courage to explain, save for political censorship,” he said, while adding that another “technique” being employed is the delay in publishing the party’s statements, thereby making them “stale news.”
“I think it is within our legitimate expectations to expect that those mainstream media houses would utilise the press releases or statements issued from time to time by the PPP,” he later said, while adding that the party is seeing a pattern and therefore must draw certain conclusions.
“We are the alternative to the APNU+AFC,” he added, while noting that what the PPP/C says should not be dismissed. He said that the party can only use what is available to get their message out to the public.
Rohee claimed press censorship was “virtually non-existent save for a few instances which cannot be described as press censorship” while the PPP/C was in office.
He said he would not consider the pulling of government ads from Kaieteur News and Stabroek News as press censorship. “That was more or less, as I see it, some kind of economic measure but then again the government put the advertisements… on the government website but eventually that matter was resolved,” he said.
In 2006, the then Bharrat Jagdeo-led PPP/C administration cut off all government ads to the Stabroek News.
It was widely-believed that Jagdeo himself instructed the ads cut-off because of this newspaper’s criticisms of his government and because he wanted to help pave the way for the advent of the Guyana Times. The Jagdeo administration had argued that the decision was a purely business one by the Government Information Agency (GINA) because it wanted more value for its advertising dollar. Ads were then placed solely with the Guyana Chronicle and the Kaieteur News. In 2008, state ads were restored to Stabroek News without explanation, but it later became clear that this had been done to enable ads to be placed in the Guyana Times.
One year after its launching the Guyana Times began to receive state ads and its volume began to rival that of the other private newspapers.
State ads were eventually pulled from all private media in the second half of 2010 after the government said it would use an e-procurement site and the state newspaper, the Guyana Chronicle.
