Wes­ley Gib­bings

Over the years, peo­ple in the me­dia de­vel­op­ment field have been pay­ing in­creas­ing at­ten­tion to in­dus­try per­for­mance and sus­tain­abil­i­ty at times of nat­ur­al dis­as­ter. It had pre­vi­ous­ly been the case that strate­gies for me­dia dura­bil­i­ty would fo­cus al­most ex­clu­sive­ly on the ten­den­cy of dic­ta­to­r­i­al gov­ern­ments and crim­i­nal el­e­ments to at­tempt to si­lence the free press through sub­terfuge, threats, death, and in­jury.

Jour­nal­ists were (and still are) si­lenced by phys­i­cal at­tacks, bribery, me­dia reg­u­la­tion, and so­cial en­vi­ron­ments con­ducive to self-cen­sor­ship. Me­dia hous­es are al­so de­lib­er­ate­ly starved of im­por­tant re­sources in or­der to crip­ple their op­er­a­tions. There are ad­ver­tis­ing boy­cotts and tar­get­ed of­fi­cial at­tacks of dif­fer­ent kinds, and to­day there is an at­tempt to un­der­mine the cred­i­bil­i­ty of main­stream me­dia through con­cert­ed cam­paigns to which the la­bel “fake news” is be­ing gra­tu­itous­ly at­tached.

Through it all, we had some­how con­tin­ued to ig­nore the fact that among the most ef­fec­tive ways a me­dia en­ter­prise can be wiped out, and there­fore ter­mi­nal­ly si­lenced, is through a nat­ur­al dis­as­ter of one kind or an­oth­er.

In 2005 at the in­au­gur­al con­fer­ence of the Glob­al Fo­rum for Me­dia De­vel­op­ment (GFMD) in Jor­dan, the two Caribbean rep­re­sen­ta­tives there put the is­sue on the ta­ble: press free­dom can al­so fall prey to dis­as­ters and the re­spons­es to dis­as­ters.

It was on­ly one year af­ter hur­ri­canes Ivan and Jeanne—both of which had bad­ly af­fect­ed His­pan­io­la (Haiti in par­tic­u­lar); while Grena­da was vir­tu­al­ly dec­i­mat­ed by Ivan. In all in­stances, the me­dia had been se­vere­ly dis­abled.

I was one of the two del­e­gates in Jor­dan. The oth­er was Jean-Claude Louis of the Panos op­er­a­tion in Haiti. Five years lat­er, it was Haiti’s turn, fol­low­ing the dead­ly earth­quake there.

At the Jor­dan con­fer­ence, I was elect­ed to the GFMD Steer­ing Com­mit­tee and there­after con­tin­ued press­ing the point. When Ir­ma and Maria dev­as­tat­ed Do­mini­ca and oth­er is­lands last year, it was there­fore not a hard sell to pro­pose as­sis­tance for af­fect­ed jour­nal­ists, via the As­so­ci­a­tion of Caribbean Me­di­a­Work­ers (ACM). The Caribbean Broad­cast­ing Union (CBU) ad­mirably fo­cused on dam­aged me­dia plant and equip­ment.

Then came last week’s floods in T&T and me­dia per­for­mance that si­lenced the “fake news” pur­vey­ors and out­right en­e­mies of the free press. Em­ploy­ing the same so­cial me­dia plat­forms so of­ten en­gaged to un­der­mine them, our cadre of young, tire­less re­porters swamped the land­scape with first-hand, ver­i­fied re­port­ing. The Guardian Me­dia team ex­celled at this, as did some col­leagues from oth­er me­dia. This was an ex­em­plary me­dia prac­tice.

It was, among oth­er things, rem­i­nis­cent of Ir­ma and Maria when so­cial me­dia mis­chief-mak­ers all ap­peared to re­main silent and un­der their beds while jour­nal­ists and oth­er me­dia work­ers were out on the field dili­gent­ly do­ing their work.

Of course, last week, some of the reg­u­lar sus­pects found time from the sanc­ti­ty of their homes or caves or nests to at­tempt to di­vert the news agen­da in the di­rec­tion of mis­chief and false­hood. In the midst of a dis­as­ter, this is un­par­don­able, to say the very least. But to the cred­it of me­dia au­di­ences these pa­thet­ic char­ac­ters were large­ly ig­nored.

Last March, the ACM as­sem­bled jour­nal­ists from around the Caribbean and sat them down along­side cli­mate change spe­cial­ists, de­vel­op­ment ex­perts, and pub­lic agen­cies re­spon­si­ble for re­gion­al dis­as­ter man­age­ment and re­lief to dis­cuss two main is­sues.

The first had to do with the re­silience of me­dia en­ter­pris­es to with­stand the ef­fects of dif­fer­ent kinds of dis­as­ters, and the sec­ond was to de­ter­mine the re­quire­ments of sound jour­nal­is­tic prac­tice un­der such con­di­tions.

Out of that ex­er­cise, we pro­duced a small doc­u­ment—a “pam­phlet”, I have been call­ing it—which is now al­so avail­able in Span­ish.

But we still need to get our act to­geth­er as me­dia and as a so­ci­ety. For ex­am­ple, the ODPM needs to sit with the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty as a mat­ter of great ur­gency to dis­cuss the need for an Emer­gency Alert Sys­tem, and oth­er re­quire­ments of this coun­try’s Na­tion­al Emer­gency Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Plan. Min­is­ter Stu­art Young needs to find the time to en­sure this is done.

This plan must ur­gent­ly be­come a prac­tised strat­e­gy. The lo­cal me­dia have al­ready an­nounced part­ner­ship sta­tus and their jour­nal­ists have proven their worth.