Soyi­ni Grey

Se­nior Re­porter

A jour­nal­ist and a gen­tle­man. That is how vet­er­an broad­cast jour­nal­ist Edi­son Carr is be­ing re­mem­bered by col­leagues re­act­ing to news of his pass­ing.

He died yes­ter­day morn­ing af­ter ail­ing for some time be­fore his death.

Carr was one of the hostages at TTT build­ing on Mar­aval Road, Port-of-Spain, dur­ing the 1990 coup at­tempt by the Ja­maat al-Mus­limeen led by Yasin Abu Bakr.

It was his voice who an­nounced to cit­i­zens, on ra­dio, that the Na­tion­al Al­liance for Re­con­struc­tion gov­ern­ment led by ANR Robin­son had been over­thrown by the Ja­maat al-Mus­limeen.

He was part of the news team at Trinidad Broad­cast­ing work­ing un­der man­ag­ing ed­i­tor Neil Guisep­pi.

Re­flect­ing on Carr’s con­tri­bu­tion, Guisep­pi yes­ter­day said, “My en­tire his­to­ry is news. When I came to Trinidad Broad­cast­ing, I set out to build the strongest news team pos­si­ble and he (Carr) was a key part of it. He wasn’t just part of the team; he was a con­trib­u­tor in terms of ideas and ways to do things dif­fer­ent­ly so that we would re­main ahead of the game.”

Di­rec­tor at the Me­dia In­sti­tute of the Caribbean and Trinidad Guardian colum­nist, Wes­ley Gib­bings, said you could not have met a kinder per­son.

“Edi­son was the quin­tes­sen­tial me­dia pro­fes­sion­al, and what he had on top of that was a fan­tas­tic per­son­al­i­ty: love­able, re­spect­ful, re­spectable,” Gib­bings said.

“This in­dus­try can be very cru­el some­times; I have nev­er met any­body who has said any­thing neg­a­tive about Edi­son ei­ther as a pro­fes­sion­al or as a hu­man be­ing.”

In his lat­er years, Carr worked as a me­dia train­er.

Guardian Me­dia’s deputy man­ag­ing ed­i­tor Samp­son Nan­ton was one of his stu­dents. He said Carr em­pha­sised the im­por­tance of paint­ing pic­tures with words, es­pe­cial­ly if one was work­ing on an out­side broad­cast and “you want the au­di­ence to be able to see what you are see­ing.”

In 2011, Carr tes­ti­fied at the Com­mis­sion of In­quiry in­to the 1990 at­tempt­ed coup. His tes­ti­mo­ny that many of the Ja­maat al-Mus­limeen sol­diers seemed not to know that the plan was to over­throw the gov­ern­ment be­fore­hand was a rev­e­la­tion. When asked for his rec­om­men­da­tion then, Carr said that the gov­ern­ment should be forth­com­ing with the pub­lic about the find­ings of the com­mis­sion to counter mis­in­for­ma­tion about what hap­pened on Ju­ly 27, 1990, and why.