Ryan Bachoo
Lead Editor - Newsgathering
ryan.bachoo@cnc3.co.tt
Social media emerged as a key concern as journalists around the world commemorated World Press Freedom Day yesterday.
The T&T Publishers and Broadcasters Association (TTPBA) said in a statement that the “burgeoning social media platforms, which now fill the mind-space of the world’s populations, and with it many alarm bells from a decade prior, have come into being.”
They labelled it “another Goliath” which the free press must now deal with.
“The combination of concentrated capital, software platforms and big data, has played a role in transforming societies and habits for news consumption, and for marketers, instant gratification and how to influence opinion. With it, inadvertently or otherwise, the fake news phenomenon has already had a sinister effect,” the statement said.
The TTPBA added that we are “saddled with a legal system with laws that are some distance behind present needs.”
However, the theme of this year’s World Press Freedom Day was A Press for the Planet. Journalism in the face of the Environmental Crisis. The number of environmental journalists being attacked or killed is increasing and it is now one of the most dangerous fields of journalism after war reporting.
Ahead of World Press Freedom Day, appearing in a Big Interview panel discussion, Guardian Media’s Managing Editor Kaymar Jordan outlined why that theme is important to the media industry in this country.
“At the core of us, in countries like T&T that experience significant flooding annually, people lose livelihoods as a result of it. The environment becomes more focused. We don’t feel the threat of the journalist as in you’re going to die here because you’re covering that issue but you can’t gloss over it because there are other issues that put journalists against the authorities that put not only them but the profession in serious danger,” she said.
Veteran journalists Andy Johnson and Ira Mathur were also on the panel. T&T ranks 25 out of 180 countries on the Reporters Without Borders Index.
Mathur described this as “healthy.” She said T&T’s media strength came to the fore during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Our journalists were quite fearless. They were on the frontlines and as we banded together as a group, we found it was really quite easy to hold the powerful to account. During the pandemic, it was an ideal time for people in authority to push back against the media and have their own narrative be told, that was a time when the media came together and held the government to account,” she said.
On the international front, the challenges to media coverage of organized criminal activity need to be monitored closely. Here, the numbers show morbidly, that 54 journalists were held hostage, 84 missing, 45 were killed and 521 were detained.
Johnson recalled the time when there was a massive demonstration through the streets of the capital during the Basdeo Panday administration to insist that freedom of the press is sacred.
Meanwhile, Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar hit out at the government’s treatment of the media.
She said: “Today, our country faces a threat to all independent institutions by the Government, and the media is not removed from this very worrying development. Too often in the past eight years, our national headlines have focused on attacks on the media from the Government.”
She added: “No media practitioner should have to face the anxiety of being attacked by the highest office of the land for simply doing their job.”
World Press Freedom Day was proclaimed by the UN General Assembly in December 1993, following the recommendation of UNESCO’s General Conference. Since then May 3, the anniversary of the Declaration of Windhoek, has been celebrated worldwide as World Press Freedom Day.