Only Guyanese with very short memories or absolutely no knowledge of our post-Independence history would be surprised at the intimidation of journalists at the press conference ostensibly arranged by the APNU (but only PNC officials in attendance) and the AFC at Congress Place last Friday. And this intimidation had to have been planned beforehand, since APNU supporters who thronged the occasion to deliver their insults and heckling had to have been invited and seated by the organisers.
They were in full view and earshot of the bevy of the highest officials of the PNC and the AFC – including Moses Nagamootoo (PM and Acting President); PNC Chair Volda Lawrence; and VP and Acting PM, Carl Greenidge – who were seated at the head table, since they were given priority seating over the invited journalists. While the party partisans’ cheers and applause — which made the occasion appear to be one of those taped game shows, with canned “audience response” — might have been excused in light of the need for the leaders to bolster their ego after their humiliating rejection at the LGE, the supporters’ raucous behaviour was frightening in light of the PNC’s sordid history with the press.
Forbes Burnham explicitly declared that the role of the media was to, first and foremost, operationalise the paramountcy of the PNC over all other institutions – and indeed the state — and to insist his word was law. But even more insidiously, he envisaged the media as acting to create a “vacuum of information”. The absence of factual information serves to prevent the PNC line from being challenged, or a competing discourse from being formed. Burnham explained his control over the Guyanese media by a “development-support communication theory”, which postulated that only information supportive of the Government’s – read PNC’s — development programme should be transmitted to the populace. And this is why the present iteration of the PNC is afraid of journalists seeking to report on “all the news that’s fit to print”.
But the PNC went even further to control the media. In 1970, Burnham acquired the national newspapers, the “Daily and Sunday Chronicle”; and the “Daily and Sunday Guyana Graphic” in 1973, and merged them as the “Guyana Chronicle” in 1976. During that year, “Radio Demerara” was purchased and merged with the already state-owned “Guyana Broadcasting Corporation”. In conjunction with the sycophantic treatment of Burnham, the P.N.C. and its ideology, the media were used to viciously attack the opposition. The racist line that Burnham and the P.N.C. could not overtly espouse (being protective of their “progressive” Third World reputation) was delegated to the House of Israel. This group fanned the ethnic fears of the PNC supporters of being dominated by the traditional supporters of the PPP by violently attacking them while predicting an imminent racial “Armageddon” in Guyana.
The independent media became vestigial: a weekly four-page tabloid (P.P.P.’s Mirror) and three “eight by seventeen” mimeographed newsletters (two — W.P.A.’s ‘Open Word’ and ‘Dayclean’ — together with “Catholic Standard” of the Catholic Church). Even these vestiges were harassed continuously by libel suits, intimidation of journalists, and non-delivery of newsprint. The last was explained as due to a “lack of foreign newsprint”, yet gifts from aboard were refused entry in the country.
While the Guyana Press Association (GPA) has condemned the actions of the APNU/AFC leaders in condoning the hooliganistic behaviour of their supporters, and APNU has belatedly “apologised”, all Guyana must be on guard for the continuation of press intimidation, and even further repression through putatively regulatory governmental institutions over the media. Now that the Government’s support has been exposed as very soft in the LGE, they will revert to what has “worked” for them in the past: bullyism and intimidation to secure 2020.
They want to create the “vacuum of information” coupled with the constant bombardment of the population with the “big lie” from the state media to foster, even in the minds of the Opposition followers, a sense of omnipotence concerning their rule and impotence concerning the latter.
