C.O.P: SMALL BRAINED, BUT WELL HUNG

Every day, I can count on at least two new email messages in my inbox. One is an offer to make my penis bigger, harder, or improve my sexual stamina. The second is an unsolicited request from some African nation for money. Maybe I’ve won the lottery. Maybe someone left me millions in a will. Maybe the descendants of some billionaire or former despot need my account number to transfer their ill-gotten gains. Sometimes, millions in African oil money will flood my bank account if I just wire an initial “processing fee” to some remote corner of the Motherland.

Despite all these generous offers, I still have a tiny penis and an empty bank account. To paraphrase Forrest Gump, I'm not a smart man, but I know what a scam is.

Evidently, our esteemed Chief of Police is not a smart man.

National embarrassment. National joke. National outrage. Take your pick. They’re all accurate. Our highest-ranking police officer taken in by a common Internet hoax? Sending money off to Senegal VIA WESTERN UNION for. . . what? The details of the story are too stupid to waste time recounting. In fact, even if he hadn’t been scammed, he’d still have to explain to the Vincentian public why he was paying good money to traipse off to some non-essential shindig in Senegal when the economy is still sputtering back to life.

The Chief of Police has offered to repay the taxpayers’ money that he wired off to the international scammers. Good. But, really, that’s not nearly enough. He must be punished. Maybe not fired (maybe), but definitely punished. He has embarrassed the country and brought the entire police force into disrepute. Him paying the money back is a given. It’s expected. But he needs a penalty beyond that. And, going forward, the discretionary spending of the Chief of Police needs independent oversight. He can’t be trusted with any degree of fiscal autonomy.

I bet he has a huge penis, though.

JULES RULES

The best thing to happen to the NDP since they lost the elections happened last week when they announced that Jules Ferdinand would be their party’s standard-bearer in West St. George for the next General Elections. In the 2010 elections, the seat was contested by Vynette Fredrick, my favourite source of unending political comedy. Vynette was replaced, briefly, by Anesia Baptiste, the caretaker who dealt her party such a vicious body blow of dissent and discord that it has yet to fully recover.

Upgrading from Vynette/Anesia to Jules is a quantum leap in quality. I’m not a fan of his newspaper column, but he has a great resumé and a solid reputation. He is better known, better qualified, has a better temperament, is more mature, more people friendly and better respected than any other mainland NDP candidate not named Arnhim Eustace.

That should scare two sets of people.

First, it should scare the shit out of the ULP and Cess McKie. Cess is a people person, much beloved in his constituency. Of the new elected representatives in Parliament, he may be doing the best job (you could persuade me that Saboto is doing the best of the newbies). But while Cess is a great guy, he hasn’t yet have to prove that he’s a great campaigner. The NDP gifted him the seat in 2010 by running an unelectable Vynette, and he coasted to victory. Facing the potential of an equally unelectable Anesia, Cess was still coasting.

Jules is a different kettle of fish. While the St. Georges constituencies still lean ULP, like the entire Windward side of St. Vincent, Jules is a serious and credible challenger. Cess has to sit up and take notice. Expect a reinvigorated Cess for the next three years in West St. George, or he is toast.

The ULP, too, has to worry. They have no margin for error, no seats to lose if they want to remain in government next time around. As much as its detractors branded it as Encyclopaedia Ralph and 14 copybooks, the ULP team was fresher, better qualified, and more impressive than the NDP’s sad sack team of election also-rans. Outside of Arnhim and Friday, the NDP ran some real dregs, or candidates with astronomically high negatives in the public view. Jules changes that dynamic somewhat. Jules is an old guy, but he’s a fresh face politically. He’s a good catch for the NDP, which must give the ULP pause. They can’t afford for him to unseat Cess. But more than that, they can’t afford him to give the NDP ticket any semblance of national credibility.

The second set of people that need to worry are the current NDP pretenders to Arnhim’s tattered throne. For the last 5+ years, the debate has been on the relative merits of Lewis, Leacock or Friday as the next leader of the NDP. If Jules wins his seat, they can kiss their aspirations goodbye. Whether or not NDP forms government in the next election, the next leader of the NDP would be Jules – as long as he can snare his seat.

That realisation must keep Linton and Leacock up at night.

THE KENTON EFFECT? SEARCHLIGHT’S RIGHTWARD SLANT

Rightly or wrongly, Searchlight has been viewed as the most ULP-friendly of our three major newspapers. With Bassy Alexander, Adrian Frasier and others writing weekly anti-government columns for Searchlight, you could never accuse them of being a government mouthpiece, but you could definitely sense that they gave the government more “fair and balanced” coverage than, say, the hysterically anti-ULP News newspaper.

I’ve always been partial to Searchlight. Its news articles are generally better written and better edited than The Vincentian, and it is just better to look at. The News, for me, is unattractive visually and unreadable editorially. For me, the Searchlight is SVG’s paper of record, as the New York Times (also accused of a liberal bias) is to the USA.

So as a Searchlight connoisseur, I’ve noticed a marked rightward slant in the subject and tone of its recent coverage. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the paper is giving more, and more favourable coverage to the opposition of late than it is to the political arm of the government.

The Searchlight’s rightward shift, not coincidentally, coincides with the return of Assistant Editor Kenton Chance from his studies in Taiwan, and the mothballing of Kenton’s own excellent, but NDP-leaning I-Witness-News website.

To make sure I wasn’t just imagining this shift, I did a little (totally non-scientific) experiment. I went home and picked up all the Searchlights I could find lying around my house (for some unknown reason most of them congregated within 3 feet of my toilet). Then I picked up 10 issues that were published before Kenton’s July 15, 2012 return to the Searchlight and 10 issues that were published after.

I (quickly) flipped through the pages and counted (1) every news article that featured the ULP or any of the political leadership of the ULP (i.e. not non-elected, civil-servant government types); and (2) every article featuring the NDP or the NDP’s political leadership. I also counted how many of the “ULP” and “NDP” articles were written by Chance. Here’s a helpful, and totally scientific-looking table to show you what I found (click it):

As you can see, pre-Kenton and post-Kenton, there were a total of 45 “political” news articles written by the Searchlight in each period. I included as “political” articles those that simply covered statements made by Gonsalves in his capacity as Prime Minister, because I didn’t wanna get into arguments about where Gonsalves the Prime Minister ends and “The Comrade Leader” of the ULP begins.

From my non-scientific sample, you can see that, pre-Kenton, the Searchlight’s coverage was slanted 62% to 38% in favour of the ULP/Government.

Post-Kenton, the bias has flipped, to a 55% NDP vs. 45% ULP mix.

Kenton wrote 56% of the articles that prominently quoted or featured Arnhim, Leacock, Vynette and the rest of the NDP. He wrote 15% of the ULP articles.

What those numbers don’t catch is a shift in tone, as well. While not in this sample, I remember Kenton writing articles that subtly and not-too-subtly mocked the Prime Minister on multiple fronts. There was the “sleeping in the UN” article, where Kenton simply repurposed Facebook quotes of the Comrade’s rather inelegant slumber in the hallowed halls of the United Nations; there was the “vendors did well for back-to-school” article, where Kenton kicked his the article with a semi-incredulous recounting of how Ralph always seems to be getting information from little old ladies – be it Bequia ferry prices or Kingstown sales figures. Those shifts in tone can’t be captured by a chart, but its safe to say you wouldn’t have seen them in the pre-Kenton Searchlight.

To be fair, the chart doesn’t catch anti-NDP tone as well. One of the articles on the chart listed in the “NDP” column was about Vynette’s infamous Parliamentary question on mobile-phone LTE coverage – when she couldn’t explain to the House what “LTE” meant or how it worked. Hardly positive coverage.

But I’m not so interested in the numbers as in what they mean.

The fact that Kenton writes most of the NDP articles might be meaningless. Plenty of Journalists have a particular “beat,” or area of focus/specialisation. Someone might write mostly about cricket. Another may cover Diaspora events.  Dayle Dasilva, for example, is probably the anti-Kenton at Searchlight. You could argue that Dayle has the “government” beat, because more of his articles report on what the Prime Minister or other Government Ministers said.

Of course, if Dayle Dasilva has the “government beat,” he should be covering potential government scandals, right? But whenever the potential for scandal raises its head, Kenton switches sides and starts seeking out Government information and officials. On the Green Party accusations that Gonsalves was padding his salary; on the Bigger Biggs brouhaha at Rabbaca; on the horribly manufactured “passport destruction scandal,” Dasilva was brushed aside so that Kenton could aggressively probe the state machinery.

Again though, that may be no big deal. Kenton may be a better investigative reporter. And investigative reporters, by and large, will be investigating the government.

Journalistic balance is a good thing. A great thing, actually. So Searchlight can’t be faulted for striving for more balanced coverage. And maybe my sample of papers isn’t accurately reflective of coverage trends over a longer or more complete period. I'm not wedded to these numbers. That said, a 20% swing away from the pro-government coverage by the supposedly pro-government paper is important. And it raises some important questions, like:

#1 – Is Searchlight’s new centralism simply reflective of Kenton’s known personal biases and influential editorial position? If you take a gander at Kenton’s Master’s Thesis on radio broadcast deregulation and democracy in SVG, you’ll be struck by the fact that his sources are primarily a who’s who of the NDP (Adrian Fraser, Dougie De Freitas, EG Lynch, James Mitchell, Kenneth John, Nicole Sylvester). Also we know, from the famous WikiLeak, that Kenton eagerly told the US Embassy’s diplomaticpersonnel he was no supporter of the ULP. No problem with that, support who you want (though, Kenton, maybe you need to be careful how much personal info you, as a journalist, share with foreign operatives). But as a non-ULP supporter with an NDP-influenced worldview, working as an Assistant Editor at a supposedly pro-ULP paper, he may have single-handedly shifted the paper’s day-to-day tone, and changed the balance of our national political discourse with it. If the Searchlight’s shift is real, then the newspaper universe will consist of the centrist Vincentian newspaper, the now NDP-leaning Searchlight, and The News, which is so wildly pro-NDP that its editor Shelley Clarke was quoted in that same Wikileak as begging the US Government to fund the NDP’s election efforts and/or get “secretly involved in the nation’s internalaffairs” with a view to deposing the ULP.

Hmmmm. . .

#2 – Is this much ado about nothing? Maybe. It may just be a cyclical news cycle. Sometimes, for whatever reason, the opposition is in the news more than the government. Sometimes news values demand such coverage. For example, one of the Searchlight issues that I randomly grabbed was published at the height of Anesia Baptiste’s scandalous expulsion from the NDP. Of course, the press covers that. Another issue hit the street when the US Ambassador was in town to hand over new coast guard vessels to the government. Again, the press would be expected to report on this event, and what the Prime Minister said in front of his American benefactor. Maybe, just maybe, the news cycle is dictating Searchlight’s shift. I don’t think it is, but it’s a completely credible and plausible argument.

#3 – Is this just lazy journalism? I’ve bitched before about the sorry state of so-called journalism in SVG, and I’ll refrain from beating that tired old drum again much today. Suffice it to say that, when you take out the articles from the empty blowhards who pose as columnists, and the sports news, and the court reporting, there is precious little news left (Except for the regular “Mr./Ms so-and-so is tired of people saying he/she has AIDS. Here is a photo of his/her AIDS test results!” High comedy). With regard to political news, the articles are limited basic, sorry, one-sided reporting of the following four different varieties: (1) Something Ralph/ULP said; or (2) Something Arnhim/NDP said; or (3) Something someone said on a radio programme; or, increasingly, (4) Something someone wrote on Facebook.

No fact-checking, no attempts to get the other side of the story, no investigation. Just he said, she said, or someone else said. Anyway, I digress.

Let’s assume that Searchlight is typical of other newspapers in SVG – that is, filled with lazy, semi-competent journalists. And let us assume that Editor in Chief Claire Keizer decides to print the paper twice a week instead of following the once-every-Friday pattern of The News and The Vincentian. Well, if you’re a lazy journalist whose workload has just doubled, and you were already fully reporting what RALPH said. . . then the only option is to start reporting what other people are saying, too. Not because of any ideological shift, but because the easiest thing to do is to sit in your office with the AC on and listen to either Star FM or Nice Radio.

If that’s what’s going on here, I’m depressed.

#4 – Is it a calculated Editorial shift? For all my talk of Kenton’s influence, the fact is that he isn’t running the paper (nor am I accusing him of any sinister Machiavellian plot to bias news coverage. He's a human being, and all humans have natural biases). Kenton is not the Editor-in-Chief. He’s the Assistant Editor. So, let’s not make the buck stop at the Assistant Editor’s desk. Is Claire Keizer aware of, and on board with, her publication’s rightward tilt?

If she is, then the follow-up question would be, why? Have her political views changed? Have the views of her readership changed? Of her advertisers? Is she sensing a shift in the political winds?

If the answer to any of those questions is “yes,” then the ULP is going to have problems getting its message out in the years leading up to the next election. And while it’s relatively cheap to create a Star FM to counter a bourgeois, right-leaning broadcast media; it ain’t cheap or easy to make a political party newspaper. Ask Arnhim Eustace, who, for all his supposed economic brilliance and business acumen, created an NDP newspaper so short-lived that no one remembers it.

SAVE NICE RADIO? REALLY?

I hear and read a lot of hand wringing about the need to “save NiceRadio.” Even Jomo Thomas, himself an oft-maligned target of Nice Radio has taken the high road, stating “Our democracy is too young for us to lose Nice Radio,” and pledging a monetary donation to help “save” it.

If you’ve been living under a rock recently, the basics of the story go like this: about 10 years ago, E.G. Lynch maliciously slandered the Prime Minister, and explicitly accused him of deliberately misappropriating public funds to take his ageing mother on a European joyride. At the time Lynch made the claim, he knew it wasn’t true, but he said it anyway. The courts found the station liable for the slander, and ultimately awarded close to $250,000 in damages. The judgement has survived multiple appeals.

Now the Comrade is coming to collect, and Dougie De Freitas, owner of Nice Radio, is saying he can’t afford to pay it. He’s offering a payment plan of $2,000 per month. Ralph, on the other hand, is countering by calling for the station to be put into receivership, so he can get the judgement while he still has his own teeth.

Journalists, NDP supporters, and more than a few moderate ULP-ites are concerned. The argument goes like this: Our democracy needs Nice Radio. It is a viable opposition voice. We must save it from the Prime Minister’s heavy-handed attempts to stifle speech and dissenting viewpoints. Let’s all make pledges to save Nice Radio.

I’m sorry. But, as Joe Biden might say, that’s a bunch of malarkey.

Let me make six quick points here:

#1. No one – repeat, no one – is “shutting down” Nice Radio. If Ralph wanted to “shut down” Nice Radio, he could have petitioned the court to sell the station’s assets – studio equipment, antennas, transformers, mixing board, generators, music library, etc. – to satisfy the judgment. Without any equipment, the station would be “shut down” and “silenced.”

That’s not what is happening. Ralph is asking for the station to be put in receivership. When a radio station is in receivership, it basically gets a new chief financial officer. That person, appointed by the court, oversees the business aspects of running the station, takes the money that the station makes – from advertising fees and costs of programming – and uses it to pay off the debt. That’s all.

If you listen to the “New Times” programme on Nice Radio (and who doesn’t), you’ll hear at the beginning when they say that it is a paid programme that is sponsored by the NDP. You’ll also hear lots of ads from Coreas Trading, Bonadie’s Supermarket, CK Greaves, etc. If the station was in receivership, the receiver would take the money that NDP pays for “New Times” and the advertising dollars, and pay down the judgment owed to Gonsalves. The programming and the advertising could continue unabated.

The listening public need not hear a single word of difference. So democracy would not be imperilled, the opposition would not lose a voice, and Dougie, EG, Arnhim and friends could continue to blame the ULP for the decline of Western civilisation.

Look it up. Internationally, even in democracies, Radio stations around the world go into receivership all the time (see here, here, here and here). Democracy marches on. It is an astoundingly lazy argument to say that just because a station is in receivership, it is being silenced. Receivership is a common legal remedy to collect debts. Our democracy is too young to be spoon-fed unadulterated bullshit by people who know better.

There are three problems with the receivership. One is that the ULP is floating the name of a known ULP supporter as the receiver. Fine. Complain about the receiver. That’s legitimate (although if the receiver is a known NDP supporter, he/she won’t exactly be trusted to aggressively collect the funds, right?). The second problem is that, if NDP stops paying for New Times and the Greaves' stop buying ads, the receiver may, ultimately, ultimately sell the radio station, thereby silencing it. But that's a loooong way away. Thirdly, the NDP and its corporate sponsors can’t stomach the idea of essentially paying Ralph for the privilege of cussing him. Apparently, the Greaves’ and Bonadies would rather eat their chequebooks before they buy advertising on Nice Radio, knowing that their ad purchases were being re-assigned to the Ralph Gonsalves slander fund.

#2. In case you haven’t noticed, this slander is close to a decade old. Nobody just dropped this judgment on Nice Radio out of the blue. You mean to tell me that nobody on Nice Radio, and no one in the NDP, did any preparation for the possibility that they would ultimately have to pay this judgment?

That’s just crazy.

Dougie De Freitas has offered to pay Ralph the $250,000 in monthly instalments of $2,000. At that rate, with the ongoing interest applied by the court, Gonsalves would get his final payment sometime after his 86^th birthday. Is this a serious offer?

On the other hand, if De Freitas decided 5 years ago to set aside $4,000 per month to deal with the possibility that he would lose the case, he’d have $240,000 today. If 10 years ago he’d started squirreling away the same $2,000 he’s offering now, he could pay Ralph in full immediately (and wouldn’t have to pay interest going forward).

In fact, exactly one year ago, De Freitas told Kenton Chance's I-Witness News that (1) He didn't know where the money would come from to pay the $250,000 bill; and (2) He'd already received contributions totaling $29,000. Where is that $29,000 now? Why wasn't he putting aside $2,000 per month last year? He'd already be up to $53,000, not counting interest. You add that to the $60,000 in pledges he's received, and I'm sure Ralph takes that $113,000 as an honest downpayment on the debt.

Why should right-thinking Vincentians (even Nice Radio supporters) be bailing out the management of the station for its lack of foresight or common sense? This debt may not have been avoidable, but it was certainly manageable.  Why isn’t anyone asking this question?? How has Nice Radio/NDP managed to seize the narrative of this story, and distract us from their own wrongdoing, recklessness, and bad management?

#3. Why didn’t Nice Radio have media liability insurance? There is insurance specifically designed for newspapers and talk radio stations that protects them from this kind of judgement. Plenty of Caribbean radio stations have it. Was De Freitas too cheap, too reckless, or too dumb to consider the fact that, eventually, he’d owe someone a big defamation judgement?

#4. Why don’t the NDP and its corporate backers simply pay the judgment? Two years ago, the NDP spent millions of dollars – millions! – on an unsuccessful four-week election campaign. Last week, they had a huge rally where van drivers were paid to transport supporters, fancy placards were printed, and everyone on the platform was sporting a snazzy, professionally-made “Save Nice Radio” T-shirt.

You mean to tell me that a party that can run through a couple million dollars in a month of campaigning can’t spend a measly $250,000 on the voice and programming that they have relied on day-in, day-out for the last 12 years? Let us suspend logic for a second and agree with them that Ralph is going to shut down Nice Radio. Can the NDP conceptualise a path to victory in 2015 that DOES NOT include an active Nice Radio? Is paying this debt something that they should even be debating or delaying?

‘Lest we forget, the NDP is the party of the moneyed Kingston elite. Not to mention the moneyed Grenadines elite. It is backed by almost all of the heavy-hitters of the Vincentian private sector. You really mean to tell me that Greaves, Bonadie, Coreas, Sprott, Mitchell and company can’t scrounge around between the cushions on their settees for enough loose change to make this little judgement go away?

Of course they can. And I think that, ultimately, they will. As much as the NDP’s corporate backers can’t stomach the idea of paying Ralph for Lynch’s excesses, they don’t want the symbolic slap in the face of having the station in receivership. It makes them look too cheap, too poor, or too divided to handle their business. And they don’t want a receiver harassing them to pay bills, or, worse yet, taking THEM to court for non-payment of past advertising bills.

But by dragging it out, by getting Jomo and friends to chip in, by having “Save Nice Radio” rallies, the NDP cleverly achieves two important objectives. First, they reduce what they will ultimately pay. Apparently, John Public has recently pledged over $60,000 to the cause. Let's not forget the $29,000 that John Public contributed last year. Great. That reduces their bill by $89,000. Why pay it all if you can fleece the public into paying some of it too?

Second, it makes zero sense pay promptly when the NDP finally has a cause that is engaging the public. People have bought into this “Save Nice Radio” shtick, which means that they are implicitly buying into the corresponding flip side of the argument, namely “Ralph is a rights-trampling despot who is stifling democracy and afraid of the NDP.” Well, if you have an issue that’s gaining traction, and no one is challenging your version of events, why would you kill your own issue by paying the bill? If I were an NDP advisor, I’d drag this out to the very day that the receiver shows up at De Freitas’s doorstep.

#5. Someone, anyone, please tell me: What substantive insight has Nice Radio provided to the Vincentian public? (I could ask the same question of Star-FM, but the only difference is that at least Star-FM doesn’t have a string of defamation judgments against it). Seriously though, isn’t 2Cool Chris’ “What does get me Vex” segment on Hot 97 infinitely more illuminating and essential to our democracy than an entire week of Nice Radio programming?

Let us say, for the sake of argument, that Nice Radio has occasionally said something important, or served as the forum for some insight or information that contributed to the strengthening of our young democracy. Was that contribution intended, or was it incidental to the general pattern of defamation and rabble rousing?

If I watch interracial porn on my computer, it might lead me to incidentally ponder the status of race relations, but I don’t think that’s what the pornographers intend. And I don’t think Obama loses the election if there is less interracial porn on the Internet. A convoluted argument? Yep, intentionally so. But no more convoluted than the fart that the “save Nice Radio” crowd is trying to blow in your face.

The lazy discussion about Nice Radio’s contribution to democracy and free expression completely ignores its own pattern of rampant irresponsibility and complete lack of journalistic or broadcasting ethics (sample ethics codes here, here, and here how many have Nice Radio violated?). Let’s not forget the obvious lack of business acumen by Dougie De Freitas. If De Freitas didn’t plan for this event, and can only afford $2,000 to “save” his radio station, then he’s an awful manager, and his station may have been going bankrupt without the Court’s help. It seems to me that De Freitas is such a financial dolt that he should welcome an astute receiver to save his business from itself.

Which brings us to another point: Suppose, for the sake of argument, that De Freitas had just run Nice Radio into the ground economically, or that it had gone bankrupt because it owed money to VINLEC and Cable & Wireless. Would it still be out democratic duty to save the station? What about if one of our newspapers – which are being stifled by the growth of the Internet and those same radio stations – suddenly goes under? Do we owe it to our young democracy to pony up to keep them solvent?

Radio in SVG is a deregulated, unregulated free-for-all. We have more radio stations than we have people to listen to them. One sprouts up every day. Anesia Baptiste could start Radio Free Thusia tomorrow. We have an unregulated Internet, where people spout all sorts of substantive and silly statements without fear of repercussions. Tell me again how the least credible, most unethical, worst run radio station in the country is suddenly the cornerstone of our fledgling democracy?

#6. Let’s not forget that there are a whole queue of other slander judgements against Nice Radio currently working their way through the legal system. Isn’t there a $155,000 judgement against Matthew Thomas/Nice Radio that’s almost out of appeals? Once we establish the principle that it’s the public’s duty to pay for the irresponsibility of unprofessional and defamatory radio personalities, everyone better get ready for these “Save Nice Radio” rallies to be a regular occurrence.