The Government Information Agency (GINA) was yesterday reported [please note: link provided by LOSP website] in the state-owned Guyana Chronicle newspaper as being gravely concerned over what it said was the "eruption of unsubstantiated criticisms" of the agency's decision to withdraw ministry advertisements from Stabroek News (SN).
The news item ran on the front page of the Chronicle and was based on what the newspaper said was a statement from GINA. No such statement was received from GINA by Stabroek News and when Stabroek News checked with GINA Editor Steve Narine it was told that the agency did not issue a statement. Narine told Stabroek News that the Guyana Chronicle (GC) had contacted GINA and solicited comments on the ads issue. There was no indication of this in the GC report.
In the Chronicle news report, GINA said that the decision to withdraw ads was "based on Stabroek News' poor circulation and limited reach" and added "the baseless criticisms were unfortunately premised on politicisation that is unsupported empirically".
GINA - no official was quoted - further went on to say "What is even more disappointing is the imprudent action by supposedly erudite persons and groups, the most recent of which were the Alliance For Change (AFC) and journalist Rickey Singh".
GINA, according to the Chronicle, said that Singh and the AFC had "fallen prey to the urge to embark on a band-wagon which lacks wheels of logic or substantiation" and added that neither of the two has provided a "practical nexus" to substantiate their claim that the ads withdrawal was an attack on press freedom. According to the Chronicle report, GINA urged Singh to "submit founding arguments with a view to reclaiming the level of repute with which he was once classified".
Responding to the GINA statements, Stabroek News Editor Anand Persaud said he was baffled that GINA would seek to refer to the absence of empirical data when it signally failed to provide one iota of evidence to substantiate the following claims i) that GINA had gotten "huge responses" from ads placed in the Kaieteur News and the Guyana Chronicle, ii) that the Kaieteur News had a higher circulation than the Stabroek News, iii) that the Stabroek News has poor circulation and limited reach. Persaud reiterated that if circulation was the basis for distribution of ads, some of the current recipients might not be entitled to any GINA ads.
Persaud said the GINA arguments were a "mishmash of innuendo and falsities thoroughly exposed by the agency's silence on the cut-off of ads beginning in November last year and up to the point of the release of a public statement on the matter by Stabroek News".
As far as Stabroek News was concerned, Persaud said that the instruction to cease ads was handed down by the Permanent Secretary in the Office of the President Dr Nanda K. Gopaul. The SN editor said there was a clear link between that decision and the series of virulent attacks on the newspaper during the election campaign by President Bharrat Jagdeo. Persaud said the cut-off represented a serious attack by the PPP/C government on press freedom and called on the Acting Head of GINA Dr Prem Misir to dispel this view by providing credible evidence to substantiate the claims made by the agency.
In recent days a number of groups and individuals - including the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA), the Alliance For Change and journalist Rickey Singh have assailed the government's decision to choke off the ads. The GHRA said "squalid practices such as these are ominous reminders to an older generation of the worst features of the Burnham era'. In a statement reported in yesterday's Stabroek News, the AFC said the withdrawal of the ads was a frontal and indecent assault on freedom of speech and that no government should be allowed to fiddle with state resources by deciding who gets it and who doesn't. "We believe that this latest action is a violation of the Constitution of Guyana and the United Nations and Organisation of American States' Charters that guarantee press freedoms, and are actionable".
Writing in the Guyana Chronicle and the Barbados Nation, Singh said "The Guyana Government has shot itself in the foot with a very bad political move that smacks of the old, discredited 'Burnhamist doctrine' of the late President Forbes Burnham which had reached into all aspects of governance, including crude interferences and worse, in the functioning of the country's media. "
He added: "As one of the journalists who had been dislocated by the "party paramountcy" doctrine of the Burnhamist era to leave Guyana in 1974 to continue my profession, I am distressed by this 'advertisement politics' by the Jagdeo administration.
I most strongly disagree with it. This should never have happened. Good judgement must lead to its speedy reversal. "