In Au­gust of 1969, a black Amer­i­can den­tist and his wife trav­elled to Trinidad for a va­ca­tion. They stayed at the Hilton in St Ann’s where guests of the ho­tel were rou­tine­ly al­lowed to use the ten­nis fa­cil­i­ties at the Trinidad Coun­try Club. How­ev­er, for this cou­ple of colour, there would be no ten­nis. They were turned away by the white man­agers of the club. When they re­turned to the taxi, the news an­gered their dri­ver so much in­stead of tak­ing them back to the ho­tel, he drove them to the Trinidad Ex­press news­pa­per down­town to tell their sto­ry. The news­pa­per ran with it and con­tin­ued to fol­low the sto­ry for weeks. But the move would back­fire. Sud­den­ly, the white-owned busi­ness­es be­gan boy­cotting the Ex­press, pulling their ads and leav­ing the news­pa­per in a tail­spin.

This was one of the ear­li­est threats against press free­dom in this coun­try, a mere sev­en years af­ter in­de­pen­dence. It would con­tin­ue in dif­fer­ent shapes and forms every decade since.

“An­oth­er crit­i­cal point was the lib­er­a­tion of broad­cast me­dia in Trinidad,” said Suni­ty Ma­haraj, a vet­er­an jour­nal­ist and now the man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of the Lloyd Best In­sti­tute of the West In­dies. “For 30 years, the [Er­ic] Williams ad­min­is­tra­tion fol­lowed by the five-year pe­ri­od with [George] Cham­bers res­olute­ly re­fused to open up the broad­cast me­dia to the pri­vate sec­tor,” Ma­haraj said.

Un­til 1987, when Prime Min­is­ter ANR Robin­son and his Na­tion­al Al­liance for Re­con­struc­tion (NAR) gov­ern­ment ful­filled an elec­tion promise of giv­ing li­cens­es to pri­vate own­ers, there was one TV sta­tion and two ra­dio sta­tions in the coun­try.

World Press Free­dom Day

The fight has nev­er been for the faint-heart­ed and that is why in 1993, the Unit­ed Na­tions Ed­u­ca­tion­al, Sci­en­tif­ic and Cul­tur­al Or­ga­ni­za­tion (UN­ESCO) de­clared May 3 each year as World Press Free­dom Day. Ac­cord­ing to UN­ESCO, it is a date which “cel­e­brates the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples of press free­dom, to eval­u­ate press free­dom around the world, to de­fend the me­dia from at­tacks on their in­de­pen­dence and to pay trib­ute to jour­nal­ists who have lost their lives in the ex­er­cise of their pro­fes­sion.”

Ken Gor­don was the man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of the Trinidad Ex­press dur­ing that tur­bu­lent time of 1969. He said the news­pa­per was able to sur­vive the fi­nan­cial hard­ship be­cause “the Ex­press had the temer­i­ty to ex­press its views hon­est­ly and forth­right­ly.” For years the news­pa­per strug­gled to com­pete with the Trinidad Guardian and as Gor­don put it, “It wasn’t up un­til then we had been able to do much more than get close to the Guardian.”

Since then, every gen­er­a­tion of T&T jour­nal­ists has had to over­come at­tacks on press free­dom in one way or the oth­er. Ma­haraj her­self led a 1996 walk­out of the ed­its of the Trinidad Guardian news­pa­per who felt pres­sured by their man­agers to go soft on the Bas­deo Pan­day gov­ern­ment.

This gen­er­a­tion of jour­nal­ists faces a unique op­po­si­tion, ac­cord­ing to Me­dia As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T (MATT) ex­ec­u­tive mem­ber Dr Sheila Ram­per­sad. The threat goes be­yond busi­ness­men and politi­cians but rather the very pub­lic jour­nal­ists serve. She said the coro­n­avirus cov­er­age puts the in­dus­try at a cross­roads in this coun­try. “Much of the at­tacks that have been tak­ing place against jour­nal­ists dur­ing this COVID cri­sis has been ridicule, de­ri­sion, mock­ery and hu­mil­i­a­tion and the plat­form that has en­abled that is so­cial me­dia,” Ram­per­sad, a vet­er­an colum­nist, said.

There is no get­ting away from this, how­ev­er. It is here to stay. “This is the new nor­mal,” Jones Madeira said. But while the age of so­cial me­dia opens up jour­nal­ists to an un­prece­dent­ed lev­el of crit­i­cism, the for­mer Guardian ed­i­tor-in-chief said prac­ti­tion­ers must quick­ly ad­just to the chang­ing land­scape. “This is just the be­gin­ning of a dra­mat­ic change in nor­mal. The new nor­mal is go­ing to be the is­sue,” Madeira said. “What we have to do is main­tain those stan­dards that dic­tate whether we gen­er­ate the trust of our pop­u­la­tion or not. That means, we speak the truth and we deal with the truth,” he ex­plained.

'So­cial me­dia is where the en­er­gy is...'

While Ma­haraj agrees that it is the dawn of a new era in the in­dus­try, the big ques­tion for her is how does the me­dia adapt to this chang­ing en­vi­ron­ment? “I think the me­dia as an in­sti­tu­tion needs to en­gage in some ma­jor re­flec­tion of how it adapts to a world where me­dia is now so di­rect,” the for­mer Ex­press jour­nal­ist said.

So­cial me­dia, she said, has not on­ly al­lowed news con­sumers to get it di­rect­ly from the news­mak­ers, but al­so re­port it to oth­ers. “Now, peo­ple are lis­ten­ing to the press con­fer­ences and re­port­ing it to each oth­er,” Ma­haraj said.

“They are not wait­ing on the me­dia to do that be­cause the tech­nol­o­gy al­lows them to do that. So­cial me­dia is where the en­er­gy is. The chal­lenge for the me­dia as an in­dus­try and in­sti­tu­tion is to find a ba­sis for reen­er­gis­ing it­self and repo­si­tion­ing it­self as a thing of sig­nif­i­cant val­ue to the so­ci­ety.”

Tech­nol­o­gy, and in par­tic­u­lar so­cial me­dia, has al­lowed peo­ple to re­port news in­stant­ly and by the touch of a but­ton. They are re­porters in their own right, but Ram­per­sad sees a gen­er­al lack of ap­pre­ci­a­tion in this coun­try for the work the me­dia does on a day-to-day ba­sis. “The pub­lic of Trinidad and To­ba­go has tak­en the pres­ence of a free press for grant­ed and very few peo­ple un­der­stand what it is like to live in a coun­try with­out a free press,” she said.

The in­dus­try has in­deed evolved with tech­nol­o­gy.

Wes­ley Gib­bings, the award-win­ning jour­nal­ist and po­et showed the dif­fer­ences of the 80s com­pared to the new mil­len­ni­um: “Com­ing up in the 80s there were taboo is­sues that weren’t touched at all by the me­dia. There was a very strong in­flu­ence by re­li­gion. I think that is now dis­ap­pear­ing.”

He said there was now a lev­el of fear­less­ness in jour­nal­ism that is very en­cour­ag­ing. That fear­less­ness is im­por­tant, as Gor­don said press free­dom is al­ways un­der threat. “The one con­stant that we’ve al­ways had is that no gov­ern­ment likes a news out­let that is do­ing its job. The news busi­ness must al­ways ex­pect to be un­der threat be­cause the on­ly way it can do its job is if it’s in­de­pen­dent,” Gor­don said.

As she la­belled this mo­ment in jour­nal­ism in this coun­try a crit­i­cal one, Ram­per­sad al­so said we should take heart in the foun­da­tion that was built over the last 50 years. “We stand on the shoul­ders of all of those who have been in this pro­fes­sion and done this pro­fes­sion a tremen­dous ser­vice, some­times for all of their lives," she said.