The younger generation never experienced, and older people tend to forget, how very limited and how very stifled the media was in the last period of President Burnham’s rule. On his accession to power President Hoyte gradually brought about dramatic change and succeeding Governments have on the whole maintained freedom and variety of expression. Deficiencies and threats remain but we have come a long way. Still, vigilance never can be relaxed to ensure that this precious right is preserved and protected.
We are richer by far in having a more open, better and more varied media as part of the life of the community. Sometimes, I suppose, those in authority must doubt this. Beset by problems and by the daily anxieties of state, they must often look upon a more vigorous and searching media as a vexation they could well do without. But should such a thought ever cross the mind it should be instantly dismissed. Quite apart from being an essential part of a functioning democracy, a strong and critical media in fact helps those in authority seek out error and identify misconceived policies ripe for change.
Certainly those who govern, indeed those who run anything from Ministry to corporation to cricket club, must be big enough to accept that anti-establishment sentiments are meat and drink to any red-blooded journalist. It is deep in all of us to be critical of those who are in control and we love to hear such criticism expressed as strikingly and amusingly and as fully as possible. Richard Hooker, the 16th Century English theologian, said all that needs to be said on that score when he wrote:
“He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not so well governed as they ought to be shall never want attention and favourable hearers.”
And it is good that this universal inclination to criticize and challenge those in charge should be able to express itself in the media of the day, else it will go underground whispering, festering and undermining.
A free media almost daily will infuriate even intelligent, knowledgeable people. It tends to take as dogma what the philosopher A.N. Whitehead suggested in his Adventures of Ideas: “It is more important that a proposition be interesting than it be true.” A free media often forgets the dictum of C.P. Scott, great editor of the Manchester Guardian: “Comment is free but facts are sacred.” A free media will probably never learn the truth of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s words: “Everything that can be said can be said clearly.” H.L. Mencken, himself one of the greatest of American newspapermen, put his finger on the main trouble when he wrote:
“The educated man… knows that newspapers are constantly falling into false reasoning about the things within his personal knowledge… and so he assumes that they make the same or even worse errors about other things, whether intellectual or moral. The assumption, it may be said at once, is quite justified by the facts.”
Yet, in the end, which is better – that a nation’s media be gagged or that it should breathe easily even if the breath is sometimes not as pure as it might be? When I was young I grew up with the words of John Stuart Mill echoing in my head because they were so often quoted by a marvellous history teacher we had, named Arthur Farrell. The “serious ghost,” we called him. Arthur Farrell used to intone Mill’s famous prescription, holding the book before us as if it was a bible:
“A State which dwarfs men in order that
they may be more docile instruments in its
hands, even for beneficial purposes, will find
that with small men no great thing can be
accomplished.”
And even more frequently “Ghost” Farrell would quote Mill’s solemn advice:
“If all mankind, minus one, were of one opinion and only one person were of the contrary opinion mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”
These words are the bedrock of all freedom of speech and they are well known. But I remember once hearing with surprise and relief some other words of John Stuart Mill which argue just as powerfully for freedom of opinion. They were words quoted by President Hoyte when he spoke at a CARICOM Young People’s summit not long after he became President:
“To question all things: never to run away from any difficulty; to accept no doctrine either from ourselves or from other people without a rigid scrutiny….; letting no fallacy or incoherence or confusion of thought step by unperceived; above all, to insist upon having the meaning of a word clearly understood before using it, and the meaning of a proposition before assenting to it.”
It is very simple. A journalist should have an unflagging reverence for serving the truth through words. There is a story about the great painter Veronese. In 1572 he was called before the Holy Office at Venice to explain why in a painting of the last supper of Our Lord he had included figures of beggars, whores, loiterers, people scratching themselves, deformed people, a man with a nose-bleed, a couple of drunks, and so on – subjects unfit to appear in a holy painting. When the grave charge of blasphemy was pressed on him and Veronese was asked why he had shown such profane matters in a holy picture he replied very simply: “Life is like that you see.”
