Debate will be held in the House of Representatives today (Wednesday) on the Government's bill to remove the requirement for State agencies to publish annual public statements in a daily newspaper and replace it with a requirement for those statements to be published either in a newspaper or on a publicly accessible website.
The Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill, 2026, was already passed in the Senate last Friday. Independent Senator Wesley Gibbings, a journalist of 40 years' standing, voted against the bill.
Gibbings said he saw in the bill the potential to be disruptive rather than positive. He said the danger resides in the bill's stipulation for publication "either/or", and he saw no need for this "since Government is digitising systems".
"Why should there be an 'either/or' when it comes to placement in traditional media? (But) the minute placement enters the realm of independent private media, it leaves this channel that the State considers to be so sacrosanct that people should not touch," Gibbings added, also expressing concern about the "culture of secrecy".
He said the bill gives public agencies the choice of using the traditional way of the Gazette and the newspapers, or online through a publicly accessible website. But he said public agencies, if given the choice between paying for newspaper publication and putting it on a website, will go for the website.
"They're all looking to save money and so on."
Gibbings had said legacy media brings journalism.
"New media, new platforms, propagandists do not bring you journalists. They bring you perspectives on things that are important and useful at times, but there is no professional obligation to get to the truth, and that's where my vested interest is."
He said legacy media is absolutely essential, particularly in this phase of T&T's development.
"It's important because of the journalism it produces; there are viability issues now."
"I want to endorse the concern by Senator (Marlene) Attzs that there are revenue considerations for existing media operations, newspapers in particular, in this case; and I do not see that as a sort of—I will never use Independent Senator (Francis) Lewis' word of 'antiquated'—there's nothing 'antiquated' about getting to the bottom of matters and finding the truth."
"Journalists have played the single most important role in helping this country understand its state of affairs. Notwithstanding the new environment and the challenge of social media, the work of propagandists who now flourish and perform, journalists continue to play this role, and if you undermine the platform that is best employed for the work of journalists, from a financial standpoint, what you have is a weakening of an institution that is very, very important. That strikes me very negatively."
Gibbings said in 2024, the Media Institute of the Caribbean, of which he is vice-president, conducted a regional scan of access-to-information laws in nine countries, including TT.
"What we found is that they all tended to be supportive of what I described in 1997.... as this culture of 'secrecy'. What is this culture of 'secrecy' as opposed to a culture of 'open governance' and 'openness'? It's not only people in government, it's in our society."
"...There's this sense that information is something that needs to be managed and held close to our hearts and our chests."
He said even among those things for which there is a commitment in the substantive Act for public agencies and public institutions to disclose, "They're in the habit of concealing and hiding, and dodging contracts and procurement awards, government expenditure."
"Were it not for the work of journalists operating in the much-despised legacy media, there's a lot of information along the lines that are specified in the Freedom of Information Act that we will not come about, at least on a timely basis," Gibbings added.
