Mrs Janet Jagan, the matriarch of the People's Pro-gressive Party, has called for a reversal of the decision to withdraw government advertisements from the Stabroek News. Writing in her regular column in the Weekend Mirror Mrs Jagan noted that the government has claimed that Stabroek News is losing its circulation and thus the decision to close down advertisements was purely a commercial decision. "On that, I don't agree. Government advertisements should be spread through the media on a fair basis, despite circulation and content," she wrote.
Mrs Jagan noted that in the course of the debate on this issue Kaieteur News had come up with some interesting points, the strongest being that in its first 10 years of existence it did not get any government ads and now it has the highest circulation in the print media. She said that this was a good argument "except for the fact that, and this is my personal opinion, it's a lousy newspaper, filled with nonsense I don't wish to read. In fact, I stopped reading Kaieteur News long ago because of its sensationalism."
Mrs Jagan went on to say that although she personally does not agree with the alleged stopping of advertisements to Stabroek News, and would urge a reversal of that decision, in no way does this mean that her views of this paper have changed. "In this column, I have several times had to refer to the perverse and mean-thinking that is expressed in the notorious letter pages, the sometimes nasty and unreasonable editorials and the misuse of the news columns to attack the party in government. In fact, Stabroek News seems dedicated to the demise of the PPP/C. Fortunately for the PPP, that newspaper's 2006 campaign didn't bring the desired outcome at the general elections."
The basic question Stabroek News must answer, Mrs Jagan said, is how has freedom of the press been attacked? "There is no such thing as censorship in Guyana, forced or self inflicted. They know perfectly well that the PPP restored freedom, press freedom and all civil rights and has never ever, endangered these rights. Is Stabroek News trying to be more "sensational" than Kaieteur News?"
Responding to the last issue, David de Caires, editor-in-chief of the Stabroek News, said that withdrawal of ads by a government had been recognised by the Inter-American Press Association as a press freedom issue and they had criticised it in Guyana and in other countries. The principle set out in Article 7 of the Declaration of Chapultepec was that "the granting or withdrawal of government advertising may not be used to reward or punish the media or individual journalists."
With reference to Mrs Jagan's claim that Stabroek News was still receiving government ads, de Caires went on to say that this newspaper was only claiming that ministry advertisements handled by the Government Informa-tion Agency had been withdrawn, and subsequently those from two state agencies.