Press
Rights: If Only the Truth Were Known...
by
John Maxwell
This
article originally appeared in the Jamaica
Observer.
"Employers should have no
power to influence how the truth is presented."
As I've
said many times in this column, journalists, whose main job is to advance and
protect the human rights of other people, are among those whose own human
rights are most in question.
For
journalists, freedom of speech is more limited than for most. In the western
world journalists can mostly say what they want, as long as they agree with the
positions of their publishers. As readers of my column know, I have had several
disagreements with Butch Stewart, publisher of this newspaper, but I haven't
yet been stopped from airing them or from criticizing him. Recent examples
include my disagreement with the Observer's
non-publication of a public opinion poll before last year's elections and my
criticism of Butch Stewart's pre-election gift of $10 million to "NGO communities"
just before the elections.
Contrast
that with what happened at the Trinidad
Guardian 12 years ago when the newspaper's
controlling shareholder, Anthony Sagba, decided that his newsroom was
not competent to comment on the propriety of relationships between the Guardian's parent organization and the
government of Trinidad. As a result of that decision, 10 journalists left the
paper and its reputation for journalistic probity was severely damaged.
The Gleaner, at the time, defended Mr. Sagba
as having made a "management decision" and advised the journalists to cool it
because it wasn't their business. I commented in this paper that the Gleaner's argument was hogwash.
"Owning a newspaper gives
him no more human rights than any other member of the public."
Mr. Sagba
had no more right to tell his journalists what stories they could print than he
would have had to walk into one of his
company's supermarkets and walk out with a ham without paying for it. Mr Sagba,
a shopkeeper by trade, should know that. Owning a newspaper gives him no more
human rights than any other member of the public. And since newspapers are not
human beings, they can have no human rights.
More than
fifty years ago a reporter named Rupert
Nash Herbert and I were the prime movers in organizing the Jamaica Union of
Journalists. The Gleaner refused to
deal with us citing its "solus" (monopoly) position in protection of the public
interest against politicians, trade unionists, journalists and others intent on
subverting the natural order.
They
even managed to influence the Registrar General, Mr. J. McDonald Sudu, who
refused to register the trade union until threatened with mandamus proceedings
by our attorney, Peter Evans.
Nothing we
did could convince the Gleaner to
negotiate with us. They dispatched
those members of our executive who were members of their staff on
assignment to journalistic Siberia: Alvin Wint to Montego Bay, Dudley Byfield
to Mandeville and Wilmot Perkins to Morant Bay. They did not dare touch our
president, a light skinned Jamaican lady named Aimee Webster.
Because of
the Gleaner's stance, Premier Norman Manley promised to legislate the
compulsory recognition of trade unions. Unfortunately this did not come to pass
for another 16 years, when Michael Manley was Prime Minister and enacted the
Labor Relations and Industrial Disputes Act. This was in direct response to the
Gleaner's refusal to recognize
another journalists' union, this one led by Ben Brodie.
Jamaican
journalists have good reason to be wary of their employers who have never been
defenders of the essence of press freedom and freedom of expression. They will
defend their corporate right to speak, but not mine nor that of any other
independent journalist.
In 1964 the
Gleaner's Editor, Theodore Sealy, who
also happened to be president of the Press Association, declared that the
government had the right to discriminate against me, using public funds,
because I had taken to "offensive extremes" my "defense of the public
interest."
"Employers will defend their corporate right to speak,
but not mine."
And the Gleaner's Managing Director, Gerry
Fletcher, a vice president of the Inter American Press Association then meeting
in Montego Bay, led their unanimous decision not to interfere in the dispute
between my paper, Public Opinion, and
the Government. They said they saw no
question of press freedom involved. Prime Minister Bustamante, his Attorney
General Victor Grant, and several of
his ministers were publicly calling for me to be jailed and for one of my contributors
to be deported. The Financial Secretary, Arthur Brown, was directed to issue a
circular forbidding any government department or any entity in receipt of any
government funds, including the Jamaica Agricultural Society and the University
of the West Indies from advertising in Public
Opinion or doing any business with the City Printery which owned the paper.
That PAJ coup
Last
weekend members of the corporate media helped engineer a coup which
unceremoniously bundled out the president of the Press Association, after five
eventful years. Desmond Richards, according to the official count, received 12
out of 149 votes in the presidential election, although we had previously been
informed by the presiding officer that only 137 people were entitled to vote.
In fact 136 voted for the new President, Byron Buckley. I said I was reminded
of elections in Tivoli Gardens, West Kingston, when Edward Seaga was the
resident pasha.
I myself
had been seriously heckled when I attempted to suggest before it was officially
accepted that all was not kosher with the voters' list.
My reasons
were simple.
The
Secretary of the PAJ and candidate for president, had managed to recruit the
support of the managements of the Gleaner,
the Observer, Radio Jamaica and Nationwide
News and to get them to pay more than
half a million dollars as
registration fees for over 200 new members.
According
to the constitution of the PAJ, applicants for membership must possess certain
qualifications and be
approved by the Executive Committee. I
have not got an answer from the Secretary (now President) to my question as to
when did the Executive approve the new members. And these new recruits, without any legal right to be present, were
vociferous in trying to deny me my right to ask these questions.
"We are
here to vote, lets get on with it" was the general sentiment.
And vote
they did.
Some people were seriously upset at Desmond's not shaking
the hand of the new president after the election. I thought Des was wrong, but I understood his chagrin.
"As journalists we are enjoined to accept favors from no
one."
As an Honorary Life Member for more than two decades and
with the added distinction of having been the only member ever to have been
expelled - a decade before that - I enjoy a somewhat privileged historical
position. Having become a member of he PAJ (1953) before all others now alive
except fellow Life Members Fred and Cynthia Wilmot, I found the entire
proceedings farcical and sad. And this is especially because Desmond had rescued
the PAJ from wreckage and made it into a prize worth having.
The key
tenet of the journalistic ethic in my view, after the duty to tell the truth,
is the duty at all costs to preserve, protect and defend one's own
integrity. As journalists we are enjoined
to accept favors from no one, lest even the merest suspicion of undue influence
may be adduced from our behavior.
And, since
journalists' first duty is to the truth and the defense of the public interest,
not even the favor or influence of one's employer is justifiable.
The public
have a right to the truth, the unalloyed, unvarnished truth, however
discomfiting or unpalatable to some. In an ideal journalistic world, employers
should have no power to influence how the truth is presented or to be able to
protect their friends and associates and their
interests.
There is,
alas, no such ideal world, although in France and the Netherlands after the
Nazi occupations, journalists insisted and got rights to freedom of expression
even against their own employers. Incidentally, this question was one of the
precipitating causes of the US embargo against Cuba, when newspaper employees
demanded the right to add corrective ‘coletillas'
to false news carried by their papers.
When our disastrous experiment with imperial
capitalism comes to its inevitable end the world will no doubt attempt to
produce a public service press, beholden to nobody except its owners, the
public interest.
Sadly, that
day is not just around the corner. Meanwhile we tolerate the Judas goats like
Judith Miller of the New York Times
and the other journalist hucksters who have sung us into war, global warming,
unsustainable development, competitive expenditure, sub-prime disasters and
other catastrophes which could have been avoided, had the truth been made
known.
Integrity
in journalism is as essential as the integrity of the public water supply.
John Maxwell a veteran Jamaican journalist. He has covered
Caribbean affairs for more than 40 years and is currently a columnist for The
Jamaica Observer. He can be contacted at [email protected].
Copyright
©2008 John Maxwell