Zahra Gor­don

Trinidad and To­ba­go has fall­en 20 places-from 30th to 50th-on the 2011-2012 World Press Free­dom In­dex, pub­lished by Re­porters With­out Bor­ders, a US-based non-gov­ern­men­tal or­gan­i­sa­tion. Ac­cord­ing to an ar­ti­cle pub­lished by the NGO on Feb­ru­ary 13, T&T has been "scarred by a case of gov­ern­ment spy­ing on jour­nal­ists."

The ar­ti­cle de­scribed the De­cem­ber 2011 search of Ex­press House re­lat­ing to the air­ing of rape footage on the Crime Watch pro­gramme and the Jan­u­ary po­lice raid of the News­day news­pa­per of­fice and con­se­quent seizure of jour­nal­ist An­dre Ba­goo's per­son­al prop­er­ty as "in­fringe­ment(s) of pro­fes­sion­al se­cre­cy."

The World Press Free­dom In­dex is pub­lished in Jan­u­ary and mea­sures the de­gree of jour­nal­ist and me­dia free­dom in more than 170 coun­tries. T&T has dropped from 30th with 8.5 points in 2010 to 50th with 15 points in 2011. In com­par­i­son, Ja­maica has moved up on the in­dex from 20th in 2010 with 7.67 points to 16th in 2011 with 3 points.

Pres­i­dent of the Pub­lish­ers & Broad­cast­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (TTP­BA), Ki­ran Ma­haraj, said both the Crime Watch and News­day in­ci­dents were "un­for­tu­nate" but not in the TTP­BA's re­mit to con­demn. "In both cas­es, the in­di­vid­ual me­dia hous­es need to look at their in­ter­nal codes of prac­tice and de­cide on the mat­ter," she said. Her com­ments come in light of World Press Free­dom Day which is recog­nised an­nu­al­ly on May 3.

Ma­haraj said jour­nal­ists need to ad­here to a per­son­al code of ethics and en­sure that it is aligned with that of their em­ploy­ers. She said that T&T is lack­ing me­dia law and me­dia lawyers. Al­though jour­nal­ists are able to op­er­ate freely un­der the cur­rent reg­u­la­tions, the pro­posed Broad­cast Code and Da­ta Pro­tec­tion Act can be­come bar­ri­ers if not ap­pro­pri­ate­ly draft­ed, she said.

"We need to pay at­ten­tion more to prop­er train­ing of in­di­vid­u­als in the field," she added. World Press Free­dom Day was pro­claimed by the UN Gen­er­al As­sem­bly in 1993 as a day to as­sess me­dia free­dom and in­jus­tices around the globe.