Fake Journalism
Sept 9, 2000
By Cindy
I am forced to bring to your and the national attention a continuing pattern of some self appointed people who continue to use their journalistic freedom to promote anti African sentiment on national radio. Power 102 personnel seems to have appropriated onto themselves the right to continue to castigate, misrepresent and pillory the African centered part of our population with their one-sided and unbalanced portrayals of anything that deals with Africa and related issues.
They continue to raise doubt, concoct false premises, and highlight their own ignorance when dealing with such matters. The latest charade or evidence to support such a view is the interview done with a Mr. Keith Smith from Trinidad who was dealt with unjustly no doubt and jailed for reasons [his so far only] in Tanzania, Africa.
A dean of fake journalism at that station immediately seized on this story to use it to prove Africans don't like Trinidadians, that all who wants to go back to Africa this and Africa that and use the issue in a general context to further try and demean anyone who expresses a point of view that is African centered.
He proceeded with his tirade based on a premise that Trinidadians want to go back to Africa, but did not identify whom and insisted that Smith's experience was the norm. The unexplained circumstances of the murder charge against the gentleman, the allegations of impropriety by female villagers and non-conformity to local laws together with many unanswered questions, did not stop 102's host from attempting to railroad the interviewee to support the conclusion that they wanted to hear.
Words were even put into the gentleman's mouth, wrongfully so, as evidenced by the name of the presiding judge at the trial.
It probably never occurred to Power 102 that the gentleman's misfortune could be an exception and not the rule as that, what was suffered by several Africans from Nigeria in this country recently.
People of African and other descent from Trinidad routinely suffer injustices, are murdered, jailed, imprisoned in, and deported from the United States, Canada, England and other places for all sorts of reasons, and at no time, is that reality ever used by these journalists to demean and insult the people who want to go to those countries and the countries themselves. You never hear such venom and negativity coming from the mouths of these journalists about such people and the countries that expelled them. This ever growing group has even been nicknamed on the streets "deportees" and "foreign used bandits". No such insinuations and innuendoes in such cases, and many of them were in the country of their dreams.
These radio personalities continue to use all sorts of high sounding lyrics like journalistic integrity, of service to the people, big on accuracy, sense of balance, the right to reply, the response from the
other side etc, and no doubt are actually striving to those ideals. It all falls down however when they have to confront their African paranoia and their very own conflict in perception of self that they would have to seek professional help for. There is nothing any of us out here can do about that, but I strongly suggest that they raise their educational levels which should include cross cultural studies and gender sensitivity training.
There is a CEO in this particular station who is always forced to intervene when his staff make statements that may hurt his business but he never intervenes when they hurt people sensibilities, and like the politicians they say do it because they love us, we help to make them No 1, and they couldn't be where they are without us.
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