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Thursday, February 20, 2025

Daly: Modern technology a threat to press freedom

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20121121

The ad­vent of mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy has re­sult­ed in an "in­sid­i­ous threat" to the free­dom of the press in T&T, says Se­nior Coun­sel Mar­tin Daly. He was speak­ing at pan­el dis­cus­sion yes­ter­day held at the Cen­tral Bank au­di­to­ri­um, Port-of-Spain. It was host­ed by the Hugh Wood­ing Law School and the top­ic was: Is there a re­al threat to free­dom of the press in T&T?

"I see a more in­sid­i­ous threat, which is a re­sult of tech­nol­o­gy...the fact is, it is now pos­si­ble for peo­ple to en­gage in more per­son­al at­tacks and cam­paigns com­plete­ly anony­mous­ly and I re­gret to say with the aid of the print me­dia who seem very undis­crim­i­nat­ing in what they al­low peo­ple to say in light of per­son­al at­tacks in re­sponse to a news sto­ry," Daly said.

"It is clear to me that we now have a new dif­fi­cult­ly and a new threat to free­dom of the press, which is the abil­i­ty to make anony­mous, per­son­al at­tacks will serve as a de­ter­rent to free speech and in turn will serve as a de­ter­rent to free­dom of the press. It's be­come a very re­al prob­lem in T&T."

Sin­gling out the print me­dia, Daly said one had to be pret­ty in­sen­si­tive not to see a new trend in the print me­dia, where the sources of front-page sto­ries were "per­fect­ly ob­vi­ous" and it was al­so "per­fect­ly ob­vi­ous they were po­lit­i­cal­ly dri­ven." "It doesn't ap­pear that the me­dia are try­ing to hide the sources any more...You see it in the me­dia all the time, par­tic­u­lar­ly on a Sun­day:?'pa­pers ob­tained by this news­pa­per,'" he said.

"Well, I could iden­ti­fy quite eas­i­ly where the pa­pers were ob­tained from, and I think this is a new threat. "And that too means that the per­sons try­ing to con­trol the flow of in­for­ma­tion are be­ing too eas­i­ly se­duced by the promise of pa­pers, or the sight of doc­u­ments gen­er­al­ly, or the sight of things gen­er­al­ly that is not avail­able in an open fash­ion.

"I see that as a new threat to free­dom of the press and I think it is po­lit­i­cal­ly dri­ven.'" Al­so dis­cussed were let­ters which were sent to the ed­i­tor. Daly said he be­lieved the po­si­tion of the me­dia was that the writer must present a bona-fide name and ad­dress, af­ter which a de­ci­sion would be tak­en on whether the let­ter would be pub­lished or not.

"I think it is pret­ty clear that is not be­ing well premised, and I think that al­so rep­re­sents a threat to free­dom of the press, be­cause it is shap­ing opin­ion, or it is giv­ing ad­di­tion­al weight to per­sons to shape opin­ion, un­der the cloak of anonymi­ty. I am quite con­cerned about that as a cur­rent trend," he added.


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