To­day's Ed­i­to­r­i­al

?The tirade un­leashed by Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert against the me­dia is a straight case of the min­is­ter "sit­ting on the riv­er stone and talk­ing the riv­er bad," in the words of the old Ja­maican say­ing.

By this we mean that if there is one min­is­ter in the cur­rent Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment ad­min­is­tra­tion who should not com­plain about me­dia treat­ment or me­dia cov­er­age, it is the Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port. This is a min­is­ter who fre­quent­ly writes three let­ters a week to news­pa­per ed­i­tors and must be pleased to see them pub­lished prompt­ly–even when those let­ters have lit­tle or noth­ing to do with his min­istry. This is a min­is­ter whose con­tri­bu­tions to par­lia­men­tary de­bates are grant­ed wide and fre­quent ven­ti­la­tion main­ly be­cause he is one of Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning's more ex­pe­ri­enced front­benchers and al­so be­cause he is the Gov­ern­ment's Chief Whip. This is a min­is­ter whose views on sub­jects of na­tion­al im­por­tance are of­ten sought, even when the ques­tions be­ing asked do not per­tain to his min­istry or field of ex­per­tise. Me­dia hous­es seek Mr Im­bert out be­cause he is gen­er­al­ly ac­ces­si­ble and hap­py to make known his views on di­verse top­ics. The prime ex­am­ple of a me­dia house fa­cil­i­tat­ing Mr Im­bert's views in an area in which he ap­par­ent­ly has lit­tle ex­per­tise or knowl­edge is the gen­er­ous space that the Guardian grant­ed the min­is­ter yes­ter­day to ven­ti­late his crit­i­cism of the me­dia.

In an in­ter­view in which he is quot­ed as ac­cus­ing some me­dia hous­es of sup­press­ing some news and giv­ing promi­nence to oth­er news, the min­is­ter is quot­ed as say­ing: "The me­dia has every right to choose to pub­lish what­ev­er it wants as it is an in­de­pen­dent, free press. If peo­ple want to pub­lish a blank page, that's their busi­ness and their right. But where I think the me­dia is go­ing wrong is in choos­ing to re­port in a one-sided way, but al­so claim­ing to be fair and bal­anced. "The US and UK me­dia de­clare their po­si­tions and do not hide their po­lit­i­cal af­fil­i­a­tion. Every­one knows Fox News is a Re­pub­li­can sup­port­er in the US and the oth­ers are pro-De­mo­c­rat. Peo­ple al­so know which UK news­pa­pers are pro-Con­ser­v­a­tive. So it's prob­a­bly time for this to hap­pen here now. Don't hide it, peo­ple should know where the me­dia is com­ing from." Such crit­i­cism of me­dia bias, it must be said, is en­tire­ly pre­dictable, very trans­par­ent and as a re­sult of its pre­dictabil­i­ty and trans­paren­cy, slight­ly bor­ing or trite even.

It's bor­ing be­cause the lo­cal me­dia have been down this road be­fore...many, many times be­fore. Politi­cians–most of­ten min­is­ters of gov­ern­ment, but Op­po­si­tion Mem­bers of Par­lia­ment have been known to use this ruse–seek to bash the me­dia when they per­ceive that their mes­sage is not get­ting through to the pub­lic or the mes­sage is be­ing dis­tort­ed. Or, more to this point in Mr Im­bert's cur­rent out­burst, politi­cians seek to crit­i­cise the me­dia when they feel need to dis­tract the at­ten­tion of me­dia hous­es away from cov­er­age of cur­rent events to self-analy­sis of whether the cov­er­age of a par­tic­u­lar sub­ject is fair, eq­ui­table and un­bi­ased. Re­cent no­table ex­am­ples of the ten­den­cy by lo­cal politi­cians to blame the mes­sen­ger in­clude Prime Min­is­ter Man­ning's vis­it to a Port-of-Spain ur­ban-mu­sic ra­dio sta­tion. For­mer Prime Min­is­ter Bas­deo Pan­day at­tacked the me­dia on a num­ber of oc­ca­sions and oth­er ex­am­ples from T&T's his­to­ry abound.

Each case of an an­ti-me­dia out­burst can be traced to the need by the politi­cians to di­vert the at­ten­tion of the pub­lic, many of whom have short at­ten­tion spans, away from crit­i­cal analy­sis of an is­sue the politi­cians per­ceive not to be go­ing in their favour. In this case, it is ob­vi­ous that Min­is­ter Im­bert is at­tempt­ing to di­vert and dis­tract the pub­lic's at­ten­tion away from crit­i­cal analy­sis of the fi­nanc­ing of the $30 mil­lion church in the Heights of Gua­napo and the fall­out over the forced res­ig­na­tion of for­mer Ude­cott ex­ec­u­tive chair­man Calder Hart. It was, all in all, a fee­ble at­tempt as the me­dia, in gen­er­al, and the Guardian specif­i­cal­ly, will not be di­vert­ed or dis­tract­ed from do­ing what is right in get­ting to the bot­tom of these two burn­ing is­sues.