“Freedom of the press is not just important to democracy, it is democracy.” Those famous words were uttered by the acclaimed and universally respected journalist Walter Cronkite. Sadly, under the rule of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) regime, press freedom is steadily and systematically being taken away from the Guyanese people. Despite that fact — and amid questions about its electoral legitimacy — the PPP regime shamelessly labels itself as being a democratic government. Guyanese, though, know the truth of the matter; press freedom is being eroded by the PPP regime.
The current iteration of the PPP regime, which began in August 2020, is worse than the last iteration with regard to media freedom. The current regime has taken over the media landscape. The Department of Public Information has been turned into the chief propaganda arm of the PPP. The state-owned Guyana Chronicle newspaper and National Communications Network (NCN) are being used to carry news only favourable to the ruling party. Independently owned newspapers and other outlets are being hijacked by the PPP.
If an independent media outlet dares to be critical of the ruling regime it is punished by being starved of advertisements and otherwise pressured by the regime. The following statement was made by the media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RWB). “State-owned and controlled media compete with several private radio stations, channels and publications. Independent and opposition media outlets struggle to compete with the advertising revenues of pro-government media outlets, which threatens their economic viability.”
As it is, the information landscape in Guyana has been made so lopsided by the PPP that Guyanese are hard pressed to find any believable source of balanced news.
The RWB report said, too, that “Although Guyana, a parliamentary democracy, guarantees freedom of expression and the right to information in its constitution, the laws are not always strictly enforced. Public officials use defamation lawsuits to criticise the media, and the threat of legal harassment can be enough to discourage journalists from pursuing an investigation. In recent years, Guyana passed legislation aimed at muzzling reporters who openly oppose the authorities. The text includes an anti-defamation law providing for fines and imprisonment for up to two years “to arrest journalists who oppose [the PPP and its supporting] political parties.”
The PPP regime is likely to reject the facts stated in this article. The ruling regime will say that the RWB compiles an annual list of countries that ranks those countries according to their degree of press freedom. The PPP will say that in 2021 Guyana was ranked as number 51, and in 2022 Guyana was assessed to have moved upward by 17 places to number 34 out of 180 countries. The PPP will say that this is proof that press freedom is improving. However, that would be a false conclusion because to understand the big picture one needs to examine the context of the ranking system.
First, the RWB’s ranking system and the list it generates is a comparative and relative compilation. In other words, it compares each country to all other countries. So, if press freedoms in other countries that were ranked above Guyana in 2021 deteriorated over the one-year period, Guyana would move upward on the list by default. The upward movement on the list, then, would have nothing to do with the situation in Guyana; the upward rise would be due to external factors.
Second, the RWB’s criteria for ranking countries has changed fundamentally between 2021 and 2022. Five completely new criteria were added to the assessment system by the RWB. In fact, the change of criteria was so radical that even the definition of the term “freedom of the press” was altered. Considering those facts, there is no basis for a conclusion that the media landscape has improved between 2021 and 2022.
Clearly, citizens should look deeply into matters such as assessments of media freedoms before coming to conclusions based on superficial rankings. At the same time, Guyanese, being aware of our country’s eroding democratic credentials must demand that political leaders reverse our nation’s decline into the abyss of autocratic tyranny.
