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Thursday, January 23, 2025

Govt must uphold freedom of the press

by

631 days ago
20230503

Trinidad and To­ba­go’s im­proved World Press Free­dom rank­ing by Re­porters Sans Fron­tières (RSF or Re­porters With­out Bor­ders) is a good in­ter­na­tion­al look for T&T, but does not tell the full sto­ry of me­dia free­dom in this twin-is­land Re­pub­lic.

In recog­ni­tion of World Press Free­dom Day to­day, the RSF’s rank­ings show T&T mov­ing up six points from 31 to 25 out of 180 coun­tries. The RSF de­scribed T&T as a “par­lia­men­tary democ­ra­cy with a vi­brant me­dia land­scape and civ­il so­ci­ety,” where free­dom of the press is a con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly guar­an­teed and wide­ly re­spect­ed right.

T&T is cer­tain­ly not among the worst coun­tries for press re­stric­tions and at­tacks on the me­dia.

Me­dia prac­ti­tion­ers are large­ly free to prac­tise with­out re­straint, though bound by the laws of defama­tion and li­bel that pro­tect those against whom reck­less re­port­ing is un­der­tak­en.

In­fringe­ments have been test­ed many times be­fore in the courts, with some of the most chal­leng­ing times in re­cent mem­o­ry com­ing un­der the Bas­deo Pan­day regime, when me­dia work­ers faced harsh at­tacks from politi­cians that some­times tran­scend­ed in­to phys­i­cal abuse at po­lit­i­cal meet­ings and oth­er pub­lic events.

But while the cli­mate to­day is much dif­fer­ent, it isn’t as rosy as the RSF rank­ing makes it out to be.

In fact, the Dr Kei­th Row­ley ad­min­is­tra­tion has over­seen sig­nif­i­cant re­stric­tions in the free­doms and priv­i­leges the me­dia en­joyed a few years ago.

For ex­am­ple, the post-Cab­i­net me­dia con­fer­ences that were held reg­u­lar­ly af­ter week­ly Cab­i­net meet­ings have all but van­ished un­der this Gov­ern­ment. Apart from giv­ing me­dia per­son­nel reg­u­lar op­por­tu­ni­ties to ques­tion the Gov­ern­ment on rel­e­vant mat­ters, the live broad­casts of these con­fer­ences al­so gave the pub­lic op­por­tu­ni­ties to gauge for them­selves, the de­gree of ac­count­abil­i­ty and trans­paren­cy ex­hib­it­ed by min­is­ters when called to ac­count on tough is­sues.

In ad­di­tion, the Gov­ern­ment’s stance in Jan­u­ary to re­strict some me­dia en­ti­ties from at­tend­ing news con­fer­ences at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre, was viewed as a move to sti­fle some jour­nal­ists whose le­git­i­mate lines of ques­tion­ing were seen as un­palat­able, prompt­ing the Me­dia As­so­ci­a­tion to de­mand clear­er cri­te­ria for ac­cess by me­dia pro­fes­sion­als to gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials.

Prime Min­is­ter Row­ley, how­ev­er, main­tained a po­si­tion that his Gov­ern­ment “will pre­serve the pre­rog­a­tive of the Prime Min­is­ter’s Of­fice to in­vite main­stream me­dia to Prime Min­is­ter’s press con­fer­ences,” when he ad­dressed me­dia mem­bers at a par­ty gala soon af­ter.

Un­der this regime too, of­fi­cial chan­nels of im­por­tant com­mu­ni­ca­tion have shift­ed sig­nif­i­cant­ly from me­dia re­leas­es to posts on Face­book pages, the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter and Min­istry of Fi­nance be­ing among the chief cul­prits.

And there have been some more overt at­tempts to tram­ple on me­dia free­doms.

Just weeks ago, this me­dia house was forced to push back when one min­istry sought to stop one of our se­nior jour­nal­ists from at­tend­ing an on­line news con­fer­ence host­ed by the min­is­ter.

The on­ly jus­ti­fi­ca­tion giv­en was that the min­istry was not com­fort­able with the jour­nal­ist’s re­port­ing on its af­fairs.

To­day, as we join oth­er me­dia prac­ti­tion­ers in recog­nis­ing the im­por­tance of me­dia free­dom around the world, we sound a strong warn­ing against at­tempts to di­min­ish of­fi­cial ac­cess by me­dia per­son­nel in le­git­i­mate pur­suit of the pub­lic’s in­ter­est and urge the Gov­ern­ment to re­flect on what it can do bet­ter to en­hance this de­mo­c­ra­t­ic free­dom that we hold so dear.


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