To­day's Ed­i­to­r­i­al

We re­spect­ful­ly in­vite Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning to re­view his re­marks about bias in­volv­ing this news­pa­per in the cov­er­age of the cur­rent gen­er­al elec­tion. We do so af­ter our own clin­i­cal analy­sis and in light of our time-ho­n­oured and much-cher­ished com­mit­ment to fair­ness, ob­jec­tiv­i­ty and bal­anced re­port­ing. In­deed, such jour­nal­is­tic eq­ui­ty and im­par­tial­i­ty are trea­sured hall­marks of this news­pa­per, hav­ing sus­tained and nour­ished our news val­ues through the gen­er­a­tions, dat­ing back to 1917. We rou­tine­ly and scrupu­lous­ly eval­u­ate our news prod­uct to en­sure we up­hold and prop­a­gate the prin­ci­ples and stan­dards which we stout­ly ad­vo­cate and her­ald.

Against that back­drop, we wish to sug­gest to Prime Min­is­ter Man­ning that he may have rushed to hasty judg­ment in his plat­form as­ser­tion that this news­pa­per has been prej­u­diced against his Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move- ment (PNM) and the Gov­ern­ment he leads. Mr Man­ning, speak­ing at a pub­lic ral­ly two evenings ago, made sweep­ing al­le­ga­tions and tarred the Guardian news­pa­per and oth­er print me­dia with the broad brush of bias.

While we wel­come any eval­u­a­tion of our news re­port­ing, we re­gret the Prime Min­is­ter's ap­proach to crit­i­cal­ly re­view­ing the role, per­for­mance and ob­jec­tiv­i­ty of the fourth es­tate. Like our oth­er read­ers, Mr Man­ning would sure­ly re­call that dur­ing the pe­ri­od un­der re­view there were pub­lic protests out­side the PNM's Bal­isi­er House and else­where by par­ty mem­bers press­ing for the se­lec­tion of their favoured can­di­dates.

Some demon­stra­tions were fair­ly noisy and all were full of colour and in­trigue and de­serv­ing of close me­dia re­portage and scruti­ny. They, af­ter all, per­tained to po­si­tions of pow­er in­volv­ing the rul­ing po­lit­i­cal or­gan­i­sa­tion of the coun­try. Re­port­ing the news that's fit to print is an adage of this in­dus­try and that's sim­ply what we un­der­took with re­spect to the PNM protests as, in­deed, for the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) tur­moil that fol­lowed. Mr Man­ning would al­so note that the con­tro­ver­sial im­mi­gra­tion is­sue per­tain­ing to UNC strate­gist Bernard Camp­bell al­so took place dur­ing the cher­ry-picked pe­ri­od he iden­ti­fied. In oth­er words, both the PNM and the Gov­ern­ment, both in­sti­tu­tions which Mr Man­ning leads, were at the cen­tre of sharp na­tion­al fo­cus and, to some ex­tent, po­lit­i­cal hul­la­baloo. We cer­tain­ly in­vite ex­am­i­na­tion of our work and, in fact, dur­ing an elec­tion cam­paign we ex­pect such an ap­praisal, al­beit a tem­per­ate and re­strained analy­sis.

At the same time, we wish to gen­tly urge Prime Min­is­ter Man­ning to note the po­lit­i­cal tin­der box that the na­tion­al so­ci­ety has be­come, with protests and plead­ings for a bet­ter qual­i­ty of life. It is the me­dia's core func­tion to re­port such ac­tiv­i­ties in keep­ing with the en­trenched ethics and canons of the jour­nal­is­tic pro­fes­sion. Against that light, Mr Man­ning should guard against shoot­ing the mes­sen­ger and against adopt­ing a pos­ture of vic­tim­hood, hav­ing al­ready an­nounced him­self as a "vil­i­fied" Prime Min­is­ter. For our part, we re­assert our oblig­a­tion and stead­fast­ness to the high wa­ter­mark of jour­nal­ism we have dis­played through the decades, in­clud­ing dur­ing the cov­er­age of more elec­tions than we can eas­i­ly count.

While we have many times be­fore heard the lin­go of me­dia bias dur­ing such over-wrought pe­ri­ods, we urge re­straint and mod­er­a­tion on po­lit­i­cal plat­forms, con­scious of the feared ill im­pact on emo­tive par­ti­sans. We re­it­er­ate out com­mit­ment to im­par­tial­i­ty and pro­fes­sion­al­ism and care­ful­ly guard our in­de­pen­dence.