I have been a media practitioner for nearly five decades. By media practitioner I mean someone working in the news media as a person gathering and disseminating news and information.
In all my years, from the time I stepped from the teaching profession to the time I became a reporter, it was drilled into me that one thing reporters do is give the public fair and accurate information.
A man named Richard Linton (R.L.) Younge who was the first person to teach me the basics said that when you get caught out in a falsehood people begin to look at you differently.
Many people have been caught napping either because of laziness and quoting the first person they met or copying something produced elsewhere and rewriting it to make the story look original.
I have often told the story about the reporter from the Guyana Graphic who was assigned the job of covering an internationally-acclaimed soprano who was due to appear at City Hall. At the time City Hall was a city landmark to be proud of.
It was a far cry from the collapsing building that stands along Avenue of the Republic begging to be either demolished or totally rehabilitated.
It was a Sunday and the reporter because of the rain chose to join some friends at the Public Service Union hall for a drink. The liquor must have been bewitching because the reporter decided to ignore the assignment.
He averaged when the City Hall concert would be over then raced back to the Graphic. He had no story but he had great imagination. He wrote how the soprano trilled and thrilled. It was a wonderful story. There were no photographs.
The Argosy printed its story the same night so that readers had a choice of stories the next day. There was the Argosy with a notice that due to the inclement weather the concert at City Hall was canceled.
I never believed that such an incident would ever happen again in this day of multiple media outlets, not least among them social media. So there it was that when I checked the newspapers I saw Guyana Times story about Joseph Harmon recanting his challenge to the Sputnik V vaccine.
I was shocked. Unless it was an exclusive interview, Harmon would issue a statement through his public relations team. He would then host a press conference if the statement does make the impact he wants it to.
So there was Joseph Harmon, the opposition leader who was criticized for trying to cause people to resist the vaccine for the COVID-19 despite the government’s efforts to have as many people be vaccinated, saying that he now supported the actions of the government to secure Sputnik V vaccines.
The story had Harmon praising the Ministry of Health and basically apologizing for his attack on the Sputnik procurement just last Friday.
There were the phone calls to me who as an old reporter should know everything according to those who called. I did not know whether Harmon made such a comment to Guyana Times. I eventually called him after I saw a poster on social media talking about fake news.
That could have been something orchestrated but then Harmon issued a statement which not only accused the newspaper of mischief but also announced legal action against the publication.
I know that the ruling People’s Progressive Party has an active dirty tricks group. I have seen letters fashioned out of Office of the President and taken on flash drives to the various newspapers.
So someone must have written the interesting article on Harmon and forwarded it to Guyana Times, the control of which lies within the ambit of Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo.
Had I been the editor of that paper I would have been embarrassed to publish a palpable untruth. I would have been more embarrassed to see the reaction to my article.
Needless to say, until Harmon came out, people began to speculate that by year-end Harmon would be a Minister in the PPP Government.
Some contended that he had been bought.
But Guyana Times is not the only one to rush to the press with untruths. A social media post by a young man who worked in the news media very briefly, reported that Chief Elections Officer of Guyana Elections Commission, Keith Lowenfield; Deputy Chief Roxanne Myers; and Region Four Returning Officer, Clairmont Mingo had been sacked by the Guyana Elections Commission.
GECOM rushed to get the truth out. It reported that Lowenfield, Myers and Mingo had been sent on annual leave, one of them for 135 days.
