The unfair competition posed by NCN to private broadcasters should be ended

Dear Editor,

I did not want to get involved in this kind of gutter debate with Enrico Woolford, who notwithstanding his long association with the media as a journalist, seems to have failed to come to grips with one simple fact. Since all of the slanderous remarks he has hurled at myself and Kit Nascimento, he has failed to comprehend that the ownership of radio and TV stations by governments such as ours is not conducive to fairness or equality between government and its oppositions. And this is not unique to Guyana!

To this day, the unfairness of providing subventions of tens of millions of dollars annually from the national budget to NCN, and still have them in direct competition with private broadcasters, in a country in which advertising is very scarce as in Guyana, is not acceptable. For them to further complicate the issue by behaving as if NCN is owned by the party in power and not all the people in Guyana is difficult to accept. That they are unapologetic and even arrogant about it, only makes it more intolerable.

How scarce is the advertising dollar in Guyana? Well, reporting in the KN Kiana Wilburg in an article dated 23 April 2019 and captioned “Private Sector investment in Guyana low – IDB” the following was reported “the IDB pointed out that private investment as a share of GDP [in Guyana] is 8.3 percent, compared to the Latin America and the Caribbean regional average of 16 percent”. Editor this means that our private sector activity is nearly 100% less than the rest of the region when expressed as a % of our GDP. This is the  result of the socialist thinking of the post-independence government which sought to own the commanding heights of the economy.  Even today 54 years later, we have not undone the damage it did to us as a modern democracy.

In my letter in SN on January 13, `Woolford’s explanation on streaming of campaign launches ludicrous’  I referred to the landmark decision in Trinidad in 1985 where Justice Lennox Deyalsingh ruled that it was unconstitutional for Trinidad and Tobago television to give coverage of parliamentary issues to the ruling party, without offering the opposition, according to the number of seats they held in the parliament, time to respond. Very shortly after this principle became the law in Trinidad, TTT as a wholly-owned government station ceased to exist. That alone tells the entire story of the bias of these state-owned media houses, and that when they are forced by their legal systems to not be biased, they are closed.

Today TTT exists as a partnership between the Thompson Organization (50%), British Rediffusion (30%), CBS-USA (10%) and the Government of Trinidad and Tobago (10%) and was developed to serve the two islands of Trinidad and Tobago in fair competition with the other TV stations in that twin island republic.

The unfair competition posed by NCN with arrogant people like Woolford in charge, should cease to exist as a government-owned station and it should be challenged immediately by the local broadcasters who are unfairly being treated in this manner.

Woolford should be made aware that the 1980 constitution did not carry an equality clause, but the constitution reform process did add it, and so now what NCN is doing to the private broadcasters is unconstitutional and is unfair to any supporter of any party which is in opposition and desires to see that their leaders are working for them.

Editor it is my fundamental belief as a pioneer TV broadcaster in this country that NCN should go the way of its family, the rest of the dinosaurs.

I also will not comment further on this matter.

Yours faithfully,

Tony Vieira