- NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - Hier 03:06

Fragility of press freedom

At the launch of Richard Charan's book A Village of One on August 26, former independent senator and journalist Sunity Maharaj noted that the government's plan to reduce advertising in traditional media was a press freedom issue. Ms Maharaj noted a 1987 effort to limit foreign exchange for a specific newspaper was ruled an attack on press freedom by the Privy Council. She called on her audience to consider what it would be like to have only social media as a news source. "Where would you find anything you could trust?" she asked. Traditional media outlets have fallen far from the positions as absolute arbiters of public opinion they enjoyed as recently as two decades ago. The public is now assailed by an online flood of information, some of it primary reporting from trustworthy sources, but the majority is unverified opinion masquerading as absolute fact, the most outrageous posts are simply lies; misinformation and disinformation injected into news feeds to mainstream dangerous and extreme agendas. News outlets that operate to journalistic standards of information verification, multiple sourcing, on-the-record, in-person interviewing and transparency in operation are inevitably slower to respond, less exciting to audiences primed to skim headlines while doom-scrolling and under-resourced to respond to pervasive online trolls. Media houses struggle to work at a high journalistic standard, slot their reporting into clickbait-hungry feeds, respond to and police comments while competing on shrinking budgets. The government has sent other signals that should worry media professionals beyond its decision to starve media houses of advertising. In response to a Guardian front page reporting on letters from prisoners being held at the Teteron Barracks under the SoE, an outraged Phillip Alexander, Minister in the Ministry of Housing, railed against the media house's corporate and civic irresponsibility. "It is my view that their media licences should be suspended if not cancelled, and where the law has been broken, editors and publishers prosecuted as far as the law allows," he wrote in a Facebook post on August 1. Mr Alexander might not have cared for the newspaper's reporting, but the work of journalism demands a fair hearing from all sides of an issue, not a servile capitulation to and endorsement of the government's decisions of the day. It would be unfortunate if such views were more widely held in cabinet. Modern journalism's role is not to stem the tide of dissenting arguments or to silence them, it is to provide a reliable and transparent alternative to agenda-driven statements and propaganda while representing the perspectives of all citizens of TT, even those cast into new depths of the nation's prison system. The practice of journalism may be expensive and support is poor, but the cost is negligible compared to the price nations pay when the fourth estate is weak. The only antidote to autocracy and totalitarianism is media freedom. The post Fragility of press freedom appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.