Who’s minding the gates?
ONCE UPON a time, at the Pearly Gates of Heaven where St Peter presides as the sole selector of souls virtuous enough to be allowed admission, there came before him a teacher, a doctor, and a journalist. St Peter met them and said, “It’s good to have you here, but we’re a little overcrowded and so I have to ask each of you a question, and if you answer it correctly, I will allow you to enter.”
Peter started with the teacher and asked, “What was the name of the famous ship that hit an iceberg and sank in the early 1900s?”The teacher smiles and says, “That’s easy. The Titanic.” Peter let her in. Then he asked the doctor, “How many people died on the Titanic?” The doctor answered with a relieved smile, “Well, that’s a tricky one, but luckily I just saw the movie, so I know. Fifteen hundred.” Peter allowed the doctor to go through. Then Peter turned to the journalist and demanded, “Name them.”
While St Peter’s activities are confined to the ethereal sphere, there are other gatekeepers who are more powerful on earth than Peter is in Heaven. They are the media. One theory of communication is that media owners and managers act as gatekeepers, selecting what should go into their news and determining what we should watch, listen to or read. As former US President Harry Truman said, “I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time.”
Even if they don’t give direct instructions as one Trinidad newspaper owner did to the staff in 1986 (We are for change!), there is a state of mind known as self-censorship, where reporters, anticipating or fearing a negative response of their bosses, write what they think would not get them in trouble.
One thing I have learnt after I graduated with a first-class honours degree in journalism in 1974 was that there is an enormous amount of insecurity within the media. The men in charge of every media house I went to for a job told me I was “overqualified”. One organisation that had asked me to stay on after a summer stint before my final year had no time or space for me after I returned to Trinidad.
The other problem is that the media gatekeepers cannot stand the same scrutiny to which they subject others. A classic example is the Gary Hart issue. Hart dropped out of the Democratic presidential nomination race on May 8, 1987, when the Miami Herald reported his liaison with a Miami model, Donna Rice. Much ado was made of Hart’s response to questions from Washington Post interviewer, Paul Taylor. When asked whether he believed adultery to be wrong, Hart agreed. Then when the reporter wanted to know whether he had ever committed adultery, Hart stammered, “I don’t have to answer that.”
A few weeks later, People Magazine
turned the tables and made the media hunters the hunted. When asked whether he had committed adultery, Paul Taylor, Hart’s nemesis, replied, “None of your business.” Mike Wallace of Sixty Minutes
fame, responded, “Oh, Jesus, I’ll get back to you.” Ted Koppel of ABC’s ‘Nightline’ answered, “Not only will I not answer that question but I won’t even tell you how I vote.” Connie Chung said, “If this is a shoeon-the-other-foot question, I think I have a run in my stocking.”
Another reporter Linda Ellerbee gave this answer, “As soon as I run for president, I’ll let you know.” One wonders how today’s Caribbean media gatekeepers would respond to such a question, or other questions on bribery, one-sidedness, corruption, nepotism, adultery, sexual relationships with politicians, and just plain lies. Can they withstand the same scrutiny to which they subject the rest of us? My own experiences with some of them make me certain that they cannot!
In many ways, one has to agree with James Fenimore Cooper, “If newspapers are useful in overthrowing tyrants, it is only to establish a tyranny of their own.” In 1960, American journalist A.J. Liebling made it even clearer, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” In Trinidad, at one time, the government owned the only television station and had guaranteed time on all the radio stations. It maintained an element of control over what the newspapers published because, even now, government advertising is a major source of income.
The fearless Stabroek News of Guyana was accused by each successive Guyana government of being on the side of the Opposition. This would have been ludicrous were it not for the withdrawal of a significant amount of government advertising from the paper, something that is happening now as the Granger government defies the country’s constitution in its brazen attempt, seemingly supported by CARICOM, to hang on to office despite a ruling by the Caribbean Court of Justice that it should both metaphorically and literally hang up its guns.
The two other newspapers and the Government’s radio and television stations continue to fly a flag that should really be at half-mast. The CLICO collapse has given the Trinidad and Tobago Government a significant number of shares (13,980,917) in One Caribbean Media and there is concern about how this power is being used now and will be mobilised and employed in the forthcoming elections.
The omnipotence of the media moguls and gatekeepers, especially those with government support, is exacerbated by their inability to accept anything that seems like criticism. The great journalist Edward R. Murrow had once said, “The press does not have a thick skin, it has no skin.” Donald Jones, ombudsman of the Kansas City Star and Times, supports this, “The equivalent of taking a quart of sour milk back to a newspaper is you’re lucky if they don’t pour it on your head.” Or as Tom Shales of The Washington Post said to a critic, “Go (expletive deleted) yourself.”