Money talks, but does it always make sense?

I remember I was leaning forward in my seat, in a ballroom I think it was. The cushioned chair was fashioned to encourage its occupant to tuck in, but I didn’t want to miss a word of this unexpected lecture on “press responsibility” from a top businessman. I did not like much of what I was hearing. (Nor did many in his audience—unsurprisingly enough — given that several were members of the media). Don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with criticism of my trade, but commentary of any sort really should have its base securely rooted in fact. Back then in that ballroom— and it must have been around 1996 — that merchant’s feet were in theoretical quicksand. The daily papers, he was complaining, were placing too much crime on their front pages. The headlines and photographs were frightening the country’s children. I waited for a statistic, a quote from a study, a report, to support his alarming statement. Not a word; not a number. He was done with that part of his lesson and had moved on to the second hackneyed reason why the dailies should window wash their front pages. The world was a global market, he announced. The media’s prominent reporting of murders and armed robberies etc, was reaching offshore investors who now had the “wrong impression that Trinidad and Tobago was in “crisis.”

They were thinking twice about bringing their money here. Again, I awaited the proof to sustain his theory. I was tempted to raise my hand and ask him to “name a company.” However, he was already on to his third and final observation, the most overused of clich?s: crime sold and that is why the press highlighted it so. While I was ready to admit that newspaper companies were as keen to sell their product as he was his, I would not concede that reporters delighted in trekking through blood, guts and brains, or inhaling death. Nor had I ever seen an editor toast a murder. I sank back into my comfortable chair. I felt weighed down by my new burden, the preservation of a tidy, happy TT. According to this man of commerce, the role of the press was to bury crime deeper in the papers than its victims were interred in the ground. That way, the country’s image was kept unstained, its children merry. Our responsibility as journalists was to engage in “constructive, positive” reporting. If we did not, Trinidad and Tobago would lose vital foreign currency and with it, possible employment.  However, worst of all, if we did not cease to write about crime, an entire generation of the nation’s children would be traumatised. But who were the children the businessman wanted insulated if not his and those of his friends? The headlines and images were not as traumatising to other young people because these lived among the crime and the daily carnage or they were too dead to be offended. But to keep his own brood on an even keel, the merchant wanted us to cast aside the chilling photographs of other dead youths. He expected the press to pretend that drug and gang-related deaths were not occurring, lie to readers, who the businessman assumed were all of his class, insulated in a rich fool’s paradise.

That was then. Now, a few years later, people of the same group as that businessman are shouting bloody kidnap. They were running to Whitehall everyday like chickens with their heads cut off with old proposals. “We want results now. We are in crisis!” cluck, cluck. I wanted to ask them, “What is that word, you are using?” ‘Crisis?’ Won’t the global village hear you? Isn’t the country still in need of the foreign dollars?” I also wondered why nowadays, there were no lectures on press responsibility from the business community, no demands that the press remove a single abduction from the front pages, not a condemnatory word about media sensationalism and greed. Ah, but wait, now. The kidnap victims weren’t ghetto youths. Kidnappers were mainly snatching the offspring of the affluent by the handful. We would not be asked to bury such news. Yet, what of the sensitivities of the poorer children who would never be abducted? Was the press not going to offend  these by placing the photos of young kidnap victims on our front pages? Should their parents not be protesting? If there had been any logic to that businessman’s argument years before, the conclusion to the last two questions would be “yes.” Fortunately, back then most of his audience concluded that his thesis was more self-serving than rational; and continued to alert the population to the spreading crime and its related violence. As we were now warning them about the growing number of kidnappings. Perhaps, years ago, people like that businessman and his friends should have paid heed to the press, instead of trying to silence us or lecture us about responsibility. It might have saved them a trip, or two, to Whitehall. And a whole lot of anguish.

Suzanne Mills is the Editor
of the daily Newsday.