Nail on the head

Writes Trinidadian journalist Attillah Springer:

"It’s World Press Freedom Day today (May 3), and I guess some of us would love to boast at the fact that Trinidad and Tobago is the only English speaking Caribbean country to be in the top 20 of the World Press Freedom Index (we’re number 19). Even UK is number 24 and the USA is number 48.

"I’ve been thinking about this number 19 status. How we ended up there. Do we really have press freedom or is it just that nobody takes the media seriously enough to think of anything that gets published or broadcast as a threat to their authority or their profit margins?

"Maybe the media are as much of a pappyshow as all other institutions in this country, like the church or parliament. Toothless, useless. Maybe we’re all just going through the motions because we don’t know anything else or can’t do any better.

"... where are the journalists who are willing to do the work to ensure that these stories get told? Where are the editors who will support them? Where are the camera people and the hackers and the bloggers doing the dirty work?"


Except in the country I live and industry I work, we're able to tell those stories. At least, we'd like to think so. Only they're tempered by advertisers and the paper's potential for lost ad revenue. They're tempered by who has the money and therefore the power. And still, it's not as bad, I suppose, as the country ranked 19th.

I've been spoilt, you see. Something I was only able to acknowledge after spending a few months at a Trinidadian newspaper last year, slowly going insane. Because outside of writing alongside the journalists I revered as a teen, there was little there for me, but to escape to the relative safety of the Private Sector and Writing Ads. But to escape to the place from whence I came via the place I tried to return.

It took me less than a month to despise the clinical green walls. The way my shoes slid on tile with every step. Unsteady. To have a run-in with a highly-respected veteran journalist whom I realized wasn't so respectable after all. To read untrained writers with more concept of editor-influenced bias than basic grammatical rules. To find Public Relations Officers who didn't understand their responsibilities.

To have newfound respect for Trinidadian reporters who struggle against the lack of resources, the non-existence of transparency and freedom of information, the mauvais langue. To meet oases in the newsroom who restored my faith in where the media could be.

Because I? I've been spoilt, you see, in a country ranked 48th where Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Speech might seem unmet, but are more achieved than in the country that ranks 19th.

So where are the journalists who are willing to do the work to ensure that these stories get told? And where are the camera people and the hackers and the bloggers doing the dirty work? Still fighting, still struggling, still scared to seek the information, well-hidden, that will enlighten readers and destroy the messenger.