Two words for the Prime Minister about Local Government Election misinformation: Maxie Cuffie. This is, naturally, in response to the Prime Minister's barking down the media for disseminating "misinformation" about the LGE turnout being the lowest on record–initially reported at around 17 per cent, subsequently revised to 34.34 per cent. (It isn't the lowest ever. In 1968, 1971, and 1977, approximately 26, 23, and 26 per cent turned out respectively. This year's is the lowest since 1983, when 30 per cent turned out.)
But these facts are irrelevant to the two matters at issue. The first is the Prime Minister's verbal abuse of journalist Sean Douglas, who is among the more competent reporters in the business. The other is the PM's objection to what he sees as the media's eagerness to transmit uncritically just about any information which comes to hand or mouth. I'm floored, I'm not ashamed to admit, by this second issue: a PNM PM objecting to mis- or disinformation? That's like the tobacco industry objecting to smoking.
Many might forget this, but the PNM has managed to hold on to power for as long as it has only because of mis- and disinformation from the smallest to the largest theatres. Small events like calypso tents and "cultural" events tell the PNM story as history. Large events like Parliamentary revelations of emails to the nation a couple of years ago, purportedly between high officials of the previous government, which all indications (like Google), suggest were fake. This didn't stop the media from running with them.
It isn't an isolated case. Remember the "voter padding" affair around the turn of the century? A story that the UNC was packing its supporters in PNM constituencies was raised in Parliament by the PNM in the late 1990s. The media sprinted with it. People were charged. The result? Not a single conviction after a decade. Not just no evidence, but no cases presented (if I recall). Another PNM invention passed off as fact.
Then there was the business of former chief justice Sat Sharma, given an ultimatum to resign or be fired by the late PNM PM Patrick Manning. Enough was published in the press at the time to convince every PNM supporter and decent upstanding urbanite of the chief justice's guilt, and call for him to "step down". But a tribunal cleared him of wrongdoing.
These are big stories; there are many smaller ones which pass unnoticed. The point is, outright lies, or quarter-truths, were and are published on many occasions to benefit the PNM. Yet, now, the PNM Prime Minister is vexed with the media for keeping up with the story as it unfolded–reporting statements from people whose business it was to know about the low voter turnout. The reporting was accurate (the experts weren't), and was adjusted once revised data were received. The media, for once, really didn't do anything wrong. Much.
Leave that for a minute. Where is/was the government's media expert, Minister of Communications, Maxie Cuffie, in all this? He who blithely announced days before the LGE elections (on the CNC3 News) that the government would hold no post-Cabinet press conference because it was busy with the elections. (The media swallowed that one without sauce.)
To state the obvious: the Hon Min Cuffie is integral to the government's position and policies on media and communications. But as to communications practice, there seems to be none. If you're going to take the trouble to appoint a minister of communications, then he should at least, well, communicate. The Hon Min Cuffie has been silent and invisible for months. That's so bizarre I'm really not sure whether it's a joke, incompetence, or something sinister, or all.
But the Hon Min Cuffie's journalistic past is especially relevant here. He was among the leaders of the walkout of the Guardian in 1996 to protest government interference in the news process.
The vanguard of press freedom they created, The Independent, whined and whinged about the "corporate media" until they were sucked into CCN in 1997-8, where Cuffie went to work, and from where, after the 2002 election, he went to work for the PNM. Post-2010, having been rejected as a candidate by the Manning regime, the Hon Min Cuffie then turned his talents to the TNT Mirror, the local repository of journalistic trash, which then Opposition Leader Rowley didn't seem to mind much.
Why should he? This was a large part of the wave of disinformation the PNM rode into power in 2015. But even more curiously, the Hon Min Cuffie, now lodged in the bowels of the PNM appears to be AWOL as far as the government's media relations, or even media positions. A cynic might say everything the Hon Min Cuffie did previously was preparation for his present exalted post and his media "career" has faded into oblivion, to wait for him after 2020.
And what about the media in all this? Has there ever been a more compromised institution? The previous government's housing distribution programme; its hiring of senior journalists; its consulting others. The present government's unthinking ownership of it. Does anyone in there believe the institution to be something other than an ad hoc stool to give a leg up to ego and ambition?
Not easy questions to answer. But there are people who should be called to answer, like the Hon Min of Communications, who is a main architect of the media as we know it today.