Head of the Presidential Secretariat Dr. Roger Luncheon says he sees no room at the moment for revisiting the cut-off in GINA advertising in the Stabroek News (SN) and any change would have to be dictated by financial and economic considerations.
Those considerations were advanced by GINA as the reasons why it decided to review the placement of government advertisements in SN. GINA said too that its decision was a policy one and was in no way influenced by the directive of any senior government official. It however noted that the government will continue to monitor the situation.
Stabroek News' position as set out by Editor-in-Chief David de Caires is that the ads were cut off by GINA for political reasons and on the instruction of the Permanent Secretary in the Office of the President, Dr Nanda K. Gopaul. De Caires said this constituted an unvarnished attack on the free press and tarnished the democratic credentials of the government.
Further, Stabroek News Editor Anand Persaud has argued that the explanation offered by GINA was trumped up to mask the real reason for the cessation.
He said the decision to stop ads was directly linked to the hostility that President Bharrat Jagdeo had channelled towards the newspaper during the election campaign. Persaud added that since the Director of GINA, Dr Prem Misir has offered the explanation that the cut-off was a result of the "huge responses" to the GINA advertisements in the Guyana Chronicle and the Kaieteur News he must provide evidence of how he arrived at that conclusion. He said Dr Misir must also explain on what basis he determined that the circulation of the Kaieteur News was higher than that of the Stabroek News. Until then, Persaud said the GINA explanation would be viewed as an amateurish concoction.
Luncheon yesterday viewed Stabroek News pursuit of answers to the cut-off as a "seeming move to sensationalize the issue and to maybe even regionalize or internationalize the issue to bear pressure on government."
This, he said, will get neither the newspaper nor its defenders anywhere since, it was purely a question of financing and economic considerations.
"My experience in this so far suggests that they are all doomed to failure, and I don't see the likely reaction would overturn the force and imperatives of the financial and economic imperatives," Luncheon contended.
In response Persaud said Stabroek News' ventilation of the matter locally and internationally was to expose the ominous attack which the government had launched on a section of the free press.
Luncheon said Govern-ment is not personally beholden to any media entity, to provide state support "except that the process is transparent and addresses those prime determinants - financial and economic considerations."
Since the issue has been made public several organizations have come to the defence of the newspaper's cause including the Guyana Press Association (GPA), the Association of Caribbean Media Workers (ACM), the Guyana Human Rights Asso-ciation and the France-based Reporters without Borders.
A number of Caribbean-based newspapers have also expressed concern at the development. The action is also being viewed as a direct contravention of the Declaration of Chapultepec on free press principles to which President Jagdeo is a signatory. Clause 7 of that declaration states that "the granting or withdrawal of government advertising may not be used to reward or punish the media or individual journalists".