Gov't promis­es to give their lives to pro­tect free­dom of the Me­dia

Re­porters With­out Bor­ders is call­ing for an in­de­pen­dent com­mis­sion of en­quiry in­to the leak of T&T?Guardian re­porter Ani­ka Gumbs-San­di­ford's per­son­al phone records, which were il­le­gal­ly passed to the Ch­aguara­mas De­vel­op­ment Au­thor­i­ty (CDA).

The me­dia free­dom or­gan­i­sa­tion, in a state­ment yes­ter­day, said it was al­so con­cerned about "the ef­fect of a smear op­er­a­tion against cer­tain jour­nal­ists and the Gov­ern­ment's de­sire to force the pri­vate­ly-owned broad­cast me­dia to car­ry of­fi­cial an­nounce­ments free of charge."

Re­porters With­out Bor­ders said:?"An at­tempt was clear­ly made to vi­o­late the con­fi­den­tial­i­ty of Ani­ka Gumbs-San­di­ford's sources, al­though this is one of the cor­ner­stones of free­dom of in­for­ma­tion." It said the lat­est de­vel­op­ment was sim­i­lar to an in­ci­dent in­volv­ing News­day's An­dre Ba­goo, who was al­so in­ves­ti­gat­ing a con­flict with­in a state in­sti­tu­tion.

The body said in this T&T?Guardian in­ci­dent, which was re­port­ed on Oc­to­ber 14, "The au­thor­i­ties seem to have re­sort­ed to do­mes­tic es­pi­onage, which is all the more out­ra­geous as Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad Bisses­sar's Gov­ern­ment pub­licly un­der­took to end such prac­tices lead­ing to Par­lia­ment's adop­tion of the In­ter­cep­tion of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Act.

It added: "How, un­der these cir­cum­stances, is a min­i­mal de­gree of trust to be re­stored be­tween the Gov­ern­ment and the me­dia? The cre­ation of an in­de­pen­dent com­mis­sion of en­quiry is im­per­a­tive." Re­porters With­out Bor­ders said:?"This at­tempt to trace a jour­nal­ist's sources comes at a time of new ten­sion be­tween the Gov­ern­ment and many jour­nal­ists crit­i­cal of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er's de­ci­sion to de­ny the me­dia any ac­cess to the Gov­ern­ment's crime fig­ures."

The group al­so crit­i­cised state­ments by Warn­er against two jour­nal­ists. Denyse Renne of the T&T Guardian and Asha Javeed of the Trinidad Ex­press have been the sub­ject of anony­mous e-mails con­tain­ing al­le­ga­tions about their pri­vate lives, cir­cu­lat­ed in what ap­peared to be an or­gan­ised and gov­ern­ment-backed smear cam­paign.

Re­porters With­out Bor­ders de­scribed as "puni­tive" com­ments by Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Min­is­ter Ja­mal Mo­hammed that all pri­vate­ly-owned broad­cast­ers would be re­quired to car­ry up to five min­utes of gov­ern­ment mes­sages every hour be­tween 6 am and 6 pm, for no com­pen­sa­tion. "Such a mea­sure is not in ac­cor­dance with the re­quire­ments of plu­ral­ism. Its im­ple­men­ta­tion will cre­ate the con­di­tions for a me­dia war and there is still time to stop this," it added.