It is no secret that traditional mass media face numerous, potentially terminal perils today.
Media establishments everywhere, including in the Caribbean, are being forced to consider changes to secure their survival. Mergers, consolidations, capture, re-calibration, staff cutbacks and closures now scar our media landscape.
The Media Institute of the Caribbean (MIC), of which I am a part, has been researching prospects for continued media viability in the region and is not coming across very encouraging news.
In fact, tomorrow and Friday, the MIC will host a hybrid ‘Caribbean Media Summit’ from its T&T base to discuss these identical issues with perspectives from experts in North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa and the wider Caribbean.
It is hoped that current regional media leadership and other influential players in academia and public policy can listen, learn and act on rational observations and conclusions.
UNESCO notes that as many as ten per cent of the world’s media enterprises have closed in recent years, for reasons including commercial non-viability.
It is clear that such fragility resides alongside longstanding threats of regulatory pressures, open hostility and violence and the more recent threat of far-reaching disinformation campaigns in mortal combat against legitimate news sources.
Witness the social media deluge. Who is being “influenced” by whom? How? And to what ends? There are big issues associated with what is at play and what is at stake.
I am no advocate for regulation. This tends to be self-serving and myopic. But I am for greater official attention to management of an untrammelled marketplace. Some countries are pursuing different actions when it comes to the “big-tech” players, for instance. Media capture by powerful commercial/political interests is also evident.
Changed socio-economic conditions, fast-evolving technologies, market dominance by big-tech multinationals, and generative artificial intelligence are all being examined as major generators of stress on legacy media.
Also, importantly, there have always been people and organisations who prefer these professional establishments not exist in the first place.
Journalists are easy targets of public hate and hostility, and media houses face vicious, unwarranted attacks when they publish narratives some find objectionable, or not in keeping with their individual convictions or belief systems.
Suddenly, as well—depending on commercial and/or political standing—media “freedoms” are considered to be disproportionately provisional upon delivery of broad social “responsibilities.”
Politicians in power become far more efficient proponents of the responsibility dictum than when they first aspired to office.
In thin Caribbean economies, state advertising is consequently deployed to reward the compliant and withdrawn as punishment for nonconformity. Paid and unpaid social media operatives diligently engage campaigns to undermine and discredit the earnest work of journalists.
The media do not stand alone. It’s the same when it comes to awareness of human rights. Perspectives on rights shift easily in accordance with power status.
Overnight, there is this transformation which suggests little understanding and support in the first place.
I have witnessed more changes in heart over the death penalty, for instance, than current adjustments in the weather outlook by meteorologists—the turning points mainly being adjacency to political power.
Today, Caribbean media face all of these idiosyncrasies and more—most of them internal in nature and related to adaptation consequent upon socio-cultural, technological, economic, and political tides of change.
Through all this, it appears clear that traditional structures and modi operandi cannot and will not withstand this convergence of longstanding adversities and contemporary challenges.
Media closures in the Caribbean, including Newsday in T&T, Stabroek News in Guyana, and a number of smaller operations throughout the island chain and mainland territories of Caricom, prove the point.
To me, the main loss from all of this is the reduction in professional journalism. Media closures are not only leading to fewer media enterprises that produce a wide variety of content, but shrinkage in the number of people who practise the profession.
In the process, a desire for greater diversity grows but is managed by a putative open market skewed by platform preference, manipulative algorithms and factors that are generally blind to human judgement.
At the same time, claims for audience attention are being leveraged by very influential actors who are legitimate in their own right, but not in all instances committed to journalistic values.
We are not sure what the future holds. But it is most likely not to closely resemble what obtained in years past. For better or for worse.
