Eat them, Mr Mayor

WE NOW expect that San Fernando Mayor Ian Atherly is prepared to eat his words. Immediately after the kidnapping of three-year-old Saada Singh last Thursday, Mayor Atherly thought it wise to appeal to the print media to stop reporting kidnappings and other crimes on their front pages. As fate would have it, however, it was the prominent front page publicity which newspapers had given to the kidnapping of this little girl which was largely responsible for her release and reunion with her family on Saturday.

Mayor Atherly is not the first to have made such a call, portraying the Press as purveyors of sensationalism and condemning the newspapers for what they see as a disservice to the country. In effect, what these critics are asking of the Press is to down play their coverage of the most alarming problem now facing the country, that is the high incidence of crime and kidnapping. The fact is, there is no way the Press can respond to such an appeal without abdicating their journalistic responsibilities to the general public who have a right to know and without diluting the principle that the degree of coverage is based on the newspaper’s sense of what is important, significant and most threatening to the society at large.

Our people and, most vitally, the authorities need to be kept constantly aware of the intolerable crime situation  existing in our country, if only to underscore the urgent need for effective measures to deal with the scourge and to foster a cohesive and comprehensive approach to solving the dreaded problem. As the kidnapping of Saada Singh now dramatically illustrates, public knowledge and information provided by the Press can also play a decisive part in solving these heart-rending crimes. As part of  this strange episode, it is now understood that pictures of the three-year-old girl  prominently published in the daily Press are what alerted her two “keepers” to the fact that she had been kidnapped. 

According to their story, the two men, living “in the bush” at Gonzales Village, Point Fortin, believed they were taking care of the stepchild of a man they knew. When the man did not return for the child, they tried but were unable to find him. It was only after seeing Saada’s face in the newspapers on Saturday that they realised the girl was a kidnap victim. In a panic, they took the girl to an area of Siparia they did not know and left her there. Again it was her picture in the papers which helped to unite Saada with her parents at Vistabella.

When KFC delivery man Deoraj Ragoonathsingh saw her at the roadside waving both hands he recognised her instantly from her photographs in the papers as “the little girl who was kidnapped.” Ragoonathsingh, who was on his way to work at KFC Siparia, picked up Saada on that lonely and forested stretch of road and took her to the Siparia CID. What was the real purpose behind this kidnapping we do not know; but we are certainly relieved and happy to know that Saada is back in the bosom of her family safe and unharmed and that the print media played a significant part in this happy ending. As for Mayor Atherly, we thought he should have known better than to join that silly brigade. We hope he has no problems swallowing his words.