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.