Joshua Seemungal
Senior Reporter
joshua.seemungal@guardian.co.tt
A little more than a week after Tobago House of Assembly Chief Secretary Farley Augustine confirmed that he was one of the persons heard in a leaked audio clip discussing paying persons with THA finances to spread political propaganda on behalf of the Tobago People’s Party, another audio clip was released online yesterday.
The audio clip, longer than the first one, features the voices of two people—a male and female—and they are heard discussing a plan to leak from a stockpile of stuff using “covert and deadly” propaganda against the opposition. The male voice says in order to control the narrative, public relations strategies won’t be sufficient, so propagandists should be recruited and employed full-time by the THA.
“Find the plan. Create the plan. The strategy or whatever. Bring it here. Get approval. Where it have 13 people now, you might just need five or six people from PR to do some propaganda—whether it’s fake profiles. What you would have to consider is to find a way to employ people on the THA side —could be menial tasks…That can help shape the narrative.
“As of now, people think the Minority Leader dumb, they think he talking stupidness, they skin their teeth when they hear him talk…but tides does change eh…We could never tell…We shouldn’t leave it for granted that the public not buying into what the opposition is saying now, but we should find ways to respond to it,” the male voice says in the clip.
The voice notes that while they would like some things done but it shouldn’t come from him.
“If there are leaks mysteriously popping up that shows our opponents in bad light, then that works in our favour. It doesn’t matter where the leaks come from. We identify a clear channel—not PR. We are talking propaganda now. It’s a little bit different from just PR - which is just shaping the narrative. You see propaganda machinery, that we need. We need a solid propaganda machine,” the voice says.
“Even with what the political leader is doing in Trinidad, what is required is a shaping of the narrative—one way or the other, and in many instances, we should get ahead of what is out there whatever the conversation is and conversations…You see if you post a story…One of the tricks we figured out during the election campaign was if you go to a story and your comment first, it influences all or almost all the comments that follows…One or two things will happen. Either all the supporters will jump on and repeat it, or the conversation moves from what the story is about to debating to what the propagandist put under this post. But the point is we need to find some people to do that work. It don’t have to be a large amount of people,” the voice added.
Last week, Augustine admitted that his voice was one of the two voices in an audio clip leaked on social media on May 22. He claimed the clip was an old recording, and that the strategies discussed were not eventually executed.
He also alleged that there was an attempt by a contractor to extort him by using the audio clip to get the THA to pay out money owed to the contractor’s company.
Attempts to contact Chief Secretary Augustine for comment yesterday were not successful.