Finance Minister Winston Jordan is of the view that the media often provide a quality of reporting that comes up short of what is necessary to enhance public enlightenment on many issues that fall under his portfolio. He believes that this shortcoming is, for the most part, a function of journalists’ limited training in specialized areas. It is sometimes not difficult to tell, he says, based on the questions that journalists ask or do not ask, as the case may be, how well-informed or otherwise they are on the subject of their inquiry.
The Minister says too that it has also been his experience that the response of journalists to not being up to speed with particular issues is sometimes to confine themselves to soundbite-type questions designed to elicit responses that create eye-catching headlines and leads. It is, he says, an approach that invariably does not make for stories that do a great deal to enhance public understanding of the issues which the story seeks to address, and again he believes that this type of journalism is a function of limited experience.
Coverage on the Minister’s budget presentation, for example, requires a broad understanding of a budget and its functions as well as a capacity to comprehend and both report on and analyze the significance of the various sectoral allocations and the implications of those for government’s overall vision for development. Those are not skills which the uninitiated are likely to grasp quickly. There are too, the complexities of the various bilateral and multilateral relationships between Guyana and donor countries and multilateral financial institutions and the conditionalities that attend the various lending and grant arrangements. Here again, effective media reporting can only derive from some amount of grounding in these issues.
Leaving aside for the moment the Minister’s views, it is true that media training, whether it be substantively in the craft of effectively utilizing language to fashion a story or in better understanding of the various disciplines on which journalists are expected to report, is not readily available in the media mainstream; and as far as the University of Guyana’s Communications Studies programme is concerned, there have been countless discourses as to whether it fits the bill in terms of what appears to be Minister Jordan’s concerns. The answer to that is almost certainly, no, and perhaps this raises the question – again not for the first time ‒ as to whether there should not be some measure of collaboration between the media houses and UG in the creation of the Communication Studies curriculum.
Insofar as training of any kind is concerned, the media houses themselves have been considerably deficient. That needs to change.
What needs to change too is a Guyana Press Association which, over the years, has not done much to seriously tackle the issue of media training. Particularly in the cases of many if not most of the younger journalists, they are expected to hit the ground running, to hone their skills through hard graft, trial and error. As it happens, that approach, frequently, does not work.
To return to the Minister’s concerns, their relevance cannot be dismissed since the media remain by far the most important line of communication between the government and the governed. Of course, the media must always guard against the danger of drifting outside the realm of balanced and objective reporting, but that does not mean that the privately-owned media and the government cannot find areas for cooperation in order to ensure that journalists are more enlightened, a circumstance that can help fair, balanced and more informed reporting on important national issues. The reality is that there is indeed a gap between many of the issues that fall under the Finance Minister’s portfolio (the same can be said for other portfolios) and the understanding of those issues by a great many journalists. The dissonance that derives from this condition has long raised questions about the extent to which the media fulfil their responsibility to their various publics. The concern renders Minister Jordan’s idea worthy of serious consideration across the ministerial portfolios.
