THERE may be a good reason for it but nothing said by the police or the Ministry of National Security has, at the time of printing, justified what appears to be a heavy-handed raid on the offices of the Caribbean Communications Network (CCN) by a police party said to comprise 25 officers.
The officers were said to be pursuing investigations into the broadcast of a tape recording of the rape of a teenager in Laventille which was broadcast during Ian Alleyne’s Crime Watch programme last October. This is a legitimate investigation and we do not believe that journalists or media professionals are in any way above the law or immune to the application of the routine procedures that are part of police work.
That being said, however, given the significance of the media to the protection and preservation of our democracy and the constitutionally enshrined guarantee of a free press, any Government would need to be particular on the application of force by the National Security establishment in treating with the country’s largest media house.
We would hate to believe that what occurred at Express House last Thursday was a routine application of police procedure. According to reports, the party of heavily-armed police officers arrived at the location and immediately sealed off the building, restricting entry and egress, which were subject to search, while producing a warrant authorising the seizure of certain documents and a video tape.
What is even more disturbing is the fact that an Assistant Commissioner of Police, Mervyn Richardson, is quoted in the Express of Friday December 30, as stating that he was unaware of the raid and could not justify the reason for such heavy application of force.
CCN chief executive Shida Bolia has stated that the company had been co-operative with the police throughout the investigation and had promptly complied with all requests for information. Why then was it necessary for this heavy show of force at the media house to collect a tape that would have been readily available on request and which by virtue of its Broadcast Concession from the Telecommunications Authority of Trinidad and Tobago, CCN TV6 would have been mandated to produce on demand?
This is a disturbing development and follows growing signs which have been ignored by the media, including members of the One Caribbean Media Group, of a culture that is intolerant of media dissent and the free expression of views contrary to the official party line.
The TnT Mirror group of newspapers has complained as high as to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Communications and the Prime Minister of the inequity and danger in the ongoing advertising boycott of our newspapers initiated by the Government and supported by several ministries and publicly owned enterprises. We have got no redress despite the fact that the Inter-American Press Association has commented adversely on this development and its implications for freedom of the press.
The Minister of Science, Technology and Tertiary Education even had the effrontery to suggest a need for the licensing of journalists, although to his credit he swiftly sought to retract the remarks when the not surprising uproar was about to crescendo. There has also been the separation of journalists from the state-owned Caribbean New Media Network, the most prominent among them being Fazeer Mohammed, for being too aggressive in their questioning of government ministers.
We shall not attempt to determine the motives behind these seemingly unrelated or related developments save to point out that they can only contribute to the creation of a culture that is inimical to the freedom of expression and the independent, aggressive pursuit of journalism.
The Government, which at the highest levels has given tacit support to the use of State resources to punish the media as official policy, needs to demonstrate unequivocally that what transpired at Express House is not the escalation of this unstated policy.
And in the meantime, they can spare us the mealy-mouthed expressions of commitment to press freedom.
