Al-Rawi’s bad news

FARIS AL-RAWI feels the media are too negative, and wants the front pages to change.

“TT is hooked on bad news…” said the Minister of Rural Development and Local Government as he addressed the opening of a trade show on Wednesday in San Fernando.

“In no other country do you see 365 days of bad news on the front pages.”

It was a hackneyed old complaint, given new life by a public official who was once the ruling party’s public relations officer – a post one would assume required some savvy and understanding of the nature of journalism.

But Mr Al-Rawi provided no evidence of that; no details of the research he purportedly conducted before coming to this view were forthcoming. This was telling, because even the most casual examination of news coverage, in this country and abroad, will reveal he is plainly wrong about what’s being reported.

One of the first things journalists are taught is: there are many kinds of news. In any given news cycle you will see all, on the cover or inside a paper – so much so that the media are often criticised when they cover “soft” news relating things like beauty pageants or “human interest” stories about soca singers crowdfunding cars.

At the end of the day, what one person calls “bad news,” another calls reality.

However, the minister’s gratuitous tongue-lashing was particularly tone-deaf for another reason: its timing.

The year 2022 was the deadliest for journalists around the world. Scores were killed, many outside war zones, and hundreds were attacked or imprisoned. Thousands more faced the various kinds of covert pressure routinely heaped on them by heavy-handed politicians and their cronies.

“In every corner of the world, freedom of the press is under attack,” noted António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, a few weeks ago.

Meanwhile, all over the planet, newspapers are closing, circulation is declining and competition from social media is eating into revenues.

But don’t tell any of this to Mr Al-Rawi, who has conveniently missed those headlines. Instead, like authoritarians the world over, he traffics in what is, effectively, anti-media rhetoric masked as critique.

Consider the state of the country if crime reporting were to be censored.

All manner of rumour and conjecture would reign. The authority of the media would be undermined.

And the State itself would encounter serious challenges. No public official would be trusted.

Conventional wisdom might suggest the minister is playing the old game of Shoot the Messenger. A more cynical view: this latest lecture is the strategy known to journalists as a “dead cat” – an attempt to shift the focus from all that is going wrong in the country – under Mr Al-Rawi and company’s watch.