The Jamaica Gleaner daily yesterday in an editorial headlined "President Jagdeo's shame" accused the Guyana government of a "vulgar and unworthy act of reprisal" in pulling government advertisements from the Stabroek News.
According to the Gleaner, at least in his attitude to the free press, President Bharrat Jagdeo and his ruling People's Progressive Party (PPP) are beginning to resemble one of his predecessors, Forbes Burnham.
"The Guyana Govern-ment's attempt to strangulate the independent newspaper, the Stabroek News, proves the point. The PPP administration is attempting to starve the newspaper out of existence in what, really, is a vulgar and unworthy act of reprisal for presumed political wrongs."
The Gleaner noted that when Jagdeo assumed the presidency, it had great hope for Guyana, particularly in his potential to engineer a transformation of its politics. The newspaper said it had assumed that Jagdeo was largely untainted by the old order of politics, divisive to the extreme and intolerant of dissent.
"We assumed that in Mr. Jagdeo's Guyana, there could be no House of Israel or murders of old Jesuit priests (reference to Father Bernard Darke) who run pesky newspapers with which the ruling party disagreed."
The Gleaner declared that it didn't expect that a "government led by Mr. Jagdeo would withdraw licences for newspapers to print, make it difficult for them to import newsprint, or use other economic weaponry to undermine the free press."
Pointing out that Jagdeo had talked the "refreshing language of change and renewal," the Gleaner said it expected he would "respect democracy and adhere to the Declaration of Chapultepec, on the rights of the free press, to which he had affixed his signature."
"Painfully, we are beginning to feel that we were horribly wrong about Mr. Jagdeo," the 173-year-old newspaper said.
The Gleaner also declared that Jagdeo and his government had done "grave wrongs demanding of the greatest condemnation.
At the launch of his election campaign, the Guyanese president launched a virulent verbal assault on the editor(-in-Chief) of the newspaper, rather than dealing with what would be permissible, robust disagreement with the policy of the paper. But what is worse, since the PPP's return to office, has been the withdrawal of government advertisements from Stabroek News."
The newspaper contended that "that is not a right that any government in a liberal democratic society enjoys. As a principle, it is fundamentally flawed. The money spent by governments comes not from the private accounts of its ministers and/or party members, but rather is the resource of all the people, to be allocated in the best interest of all the society. A free press that challenges those who lead to a better quality of governance is in the interest of the society."
According to Gleaner, "in the case of Stabroek News, it is not only ethical, but makes good economic sense that government agencies and departments place their adverts in that paper. It is the country's best, most serious and largest circulating newspaper. Until the government proves otherwise with empirical data, it knows that it lies with its declarations to the contrary."
Meanwhile, in an editorial yesterday the Catholic Stan-dard said it was respectfully asking the government "to consider withdrawing its decision not to place government ads in the Stabroek News, but to recall rather their Party's own reaction and defence of press freedom in former days."
The editorial said "it would indeed be a tremendous pity for this government to spoil its so far very good and commendable record on press freedom in this country, one which the Stabroek News itself has often pointed to."
The Catholic Standard also argued that "given this country's collective sub-conscious, our common ancestral memory based very firmly on previous experience, it must be pointed out, that even if the government perceives this decision to be just, this will never be a perception shared by its people, with its memories of the 'legal' methods formerly employed to clamp down on press freedom in this country - libel suits, denial of newsprint, etc."
Hardly serendipitous
Moreover, the Catholic Standard pointed out, "the timing of such a decision was hardly serendipitous, coming at a time when the Stabroek News was 'critical' of the government. Such a perception will be further compounded by the fact that the cutback was not shared out equally amongst all newspapers. . . "
The editorial commented, too, that "as a newspaper which has itself benefited under this government's policy - thus far - of press freedom, the Standard has noted with concern, a growing fear in the public that consultation might be lessening, a real fear that the participatory voices of the citizenry who are interested in the welfare of this country may be starting to be no longer heeded."
Meantime, 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 Acting Head 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.