In Guyana, the relationship between the media and the Government — starting from the 1960s, when the former played a critical role in ousting the latter — has been fraught with unnecessary tension. Most recently, because of our oil-driven higher profile, we have witnessed the entry of a new form of journalism, Gonzo Journalism, to our shores. By one account, “Gonzo journalism is a style of journalism that features the author as its protagonist… (They) become part of the story, portraying events through their own experience, which offers readers their version of the truth. In gonzo journalism, the personality of the piece and its subjective truths are more important than the actual facts of the story, so certain aspects of the writing are often exaggerated or profane, while the tone and writing style may rely on hyperbole, humour, and sarcasm.”
In our democratic (albeit initially colonial-ruled) 1960s, the press was privately owned, as it mostly is today. A section of the press, aligned with the Opposition of the day back then, however, created and foisted hysteria in the country by their daily vitriolic outpourings that the elected Government of the day was “communist”. The Government was going to reduce the populace to slavery to serve their nefarious, obviously totalitarian ends, etc. etc. History has shown that these “facts” actually lay: some who pulled the strings eventually apologised. But the damage had been done: big power intervention followed by twenty-eight years of destruction and decrepitude.
However, the danger that journalism might be used to subvert democracy by stoking the fears of ordinary people and others had been identified long before. In fact, by a man who is widely regarded as one of the founders of modern journalism – the American Walter Lippmann. Lippmann had served in WWI as the US’ propaganda chief in Europe, and observed from within how easily the minds of people can be swayed by a mixture of opinions on tenuous “facts”. Returning to peacetime America, he wrote a prescient text, “Liberty and the News”, which was re-released a decade ago because of its topicality in the modern world.
Lippmann identified what he defined as a “crisis in journalism”, precipitated by the sheer explosion of information about a world that had become smaller because of increased communication. And that was before the internet! No one, he pointed out, could now keep track of what was going on around even his/her limited sphere. John Public now depended on the press to perform that function. But unlike most commentators who felt the danger lay in advertisers influencing the news, Lippmann believed that the greater menace originated in the smug assurance of some journalists of their omniscience. And their propensity to place their opinions ahead of facts. Worse yet, there were some that manufactured their “facts”.
There is a confusion of what “liberty” under a democracy meant for journalism: not just to print whatever came to mind, but according to Lippmann, “the effort to protect for public use, access to a factual record”. This is a lesson that is lost to some local newspapers: that veracity comes before “edification”. With Gonzo Journalism, we have journalists that still use “he seh she seh and dem seh”, but now add “me seh” to define businessmen and governments in toto as “corrupt” by simply making claims of their own artifice or by individuals with their own agendas.
There is the further irony that in being so arrogant in asserting that their opinion is not merely a point of view but instead the “TRUTH”, these journalists betray their own totalitarian and fascist tendencies. Some have pointed out these tendencies arise out of their Nietzschean ressentiment of being failures but yet obsessed about being “First World” and “putting Third Worlders in their place.” This is, as has been remarked, a most dangerous development.
We call upon the members of our newspaper fraternity to call out these Gonzo Journalists, especially on social media, who are destroying the good name of journalism. Or would we rather repeat history?
