Another country
Casting one's mind back twenty years to the murder of Father Bernard Darke S.J. by members of the House of Israel requires an effort of the imagination. Guyana was a land of fear. Father Darke, who was not a professional photographer, heard the crowd coming down Brickdam from the magistrate's court where Walter Rodney had been on trial and went out to see what was happening. He took a photograph of some persons attacking Mr Mike James after which he was attacked and stabbed in broad daylight outside the police station. Though there were photographs of the incident which were seen by many people the state controlled radio and newspaper, which then had a monopoly, broadcast and published an entirely fictitious account of what had happened. The event sent shockwaves through Guyana and the Caribbean. It was a new level of public brutality and terror, shamelessly displayed. Guyana was seen by many in the region as moving in the direction of Haiti, a land in which you criticised or opposed the government at your peril. Father Darke had become an innocent martyr for press freedom. David Hill, otherwise known as Rabbi Washington, later confessed to Father Andrew Morrison S.J., then editor of the Catholic Standard, that he was the intended target and asked his forgiveness. It was the Standard, an eight-page mini-tabloid weekly, that was left to put together the story of the murder in its next issue. Though not a professional journalist, Fr Morrison had the essential journalistic qualities of courage and energy. Undeterred by this incident he continued to do his job of recording the news each week to the best of his ability. Despite a series of libel actions, problems in getting newsprint and other forms of pressure the Standard kept going. There have been major changes since then. There is now complete freedom of expression though physical attacks on media personnel in the last year have shown that there are still those who do not accept media freedom when it is not perceived to be in their interest. The essence of media freedom is that the media must be free to do their job without fear or favour, subject only to the constraints of the law. There has been another threat to media freedom in recent times and that is the development of a grossly biased and unprofessional brand of media coverage on television. It masquerades as a kind of journalism but is essentially a form of propaganda in which there is no respect for facts or for the discipline that journalists seek to impose on themselves in reporting the news. Opinion is mixed freely with facts, no effort is made to check anything and what comes out is often little more than political and social bile and hatemongering. This kind of louche reportage is a discredit to everything that journalism stands for. The commemoration of Father Darke's murder reminds us that even in one of Guyana's darkest hours when might was right and intolerance prevailed a little flame of freedom was still burning.
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