Notes on a journalistic journey

SEPTEMBER 20, 2015 | BY KNEWS | FILED UNDER FEATURES / COLUMNISTS, FREDDIE KISSOON

After the PPP came to power in 1992, the Catholic Standard board enunciated a policy that the newspaper should go back to its original mandate of serving its Catholic parishioners. Its great editor, Father Andrew Morrison had indicated that to me. He informed me also that he received from the board’s chairman, Mr. Albert Rodrigues, the request to drop my column because the Standard was now a different newspaper. I later found out that Mr. Rodrigues, an architect, had other reasons for wanting the Standard to go in a different direction. As an architect, Mr. Rodrigues could secure contracts with the new government There are times contrasting emotions would rivet my mind when I am in lonely, pensive moments. I would be enraged when I think of some of the things done to me and at the same time I would laugh because looking back, they were so funny. I was asked to leave the Standard after a particular column of mine focused on corruption within the new PPP Government in 1994. It was about custom duty evasion by an Eccles businessman. First Lady, Janet Jagan complained to Father Morrison and no doubt Rodrigues himself. Rodrigues subsequently got many contracts from the presidency of both Cheddi and Janet Jagan I heard Anna Benjamin former Sunday editor of the Stabroek News is writing a book on the history of the Stabroek News. Will it be a work of scholarship or emotional propaganda? Anna Benjamin has the distinction of perhaps (I say “perhaps” because I haven’t done the research) being the only editor of a newspaper anywhere in the world that didn’t rise through the journalistic ranks. It is virtually impossible to become the editor of a newspaper without prior practice of journalistic reporting. Ms. Benjamin came straight from the Queen’s College classroom into editorship duties at the Stabroek News. That was the way the crème de la crème – David De Caires and Miles Fitzpatrick – of Guyanese society operated. As we are on this topic, I could remember attending a symposium at the Catholic Centre in Oronoque Street in which “Kit” Nascimento said that that De Caires and Fitzpatrick were not media people so he couldn’t understand how they could be editing a newspaper. I have never been a fan of Nascimento but I will always remember those words and they will find themselves in a paragraph once I do my memoirs. Nascimento was so right. One year during the Easter break, De Caires went to his holiday home in the UK and left the lawyer, Miles Fitzpatrick to edit the newspaper. The very first column Fitzpatrick looked at from me, we had a huge disagreement. He didn’t understand a damn thing about editing a newspaper and should have stuck to court room histrionics. I still have his correspondence to me in which he asserted to me that if he had his way the Stabroek News would not carry columnists. I will always remember Miles Fitzpatrick as one of the few persons in this life who think he was the best intellectual Guyana produced. I laugh when I look back at such times. Would Ms. Benjamin be objective in her history of the Stabroek News? I wonder if my days at Stabroek News would find a paragraph in her book and the reason why I was asked to stop writing. One should not envy Ms. Benjamin. She has to balance her legacy as a Queen’s College teacher and what her past students would think of her work if it is propagandistic and her loyalty to the newspaper. I hope her book comes out soon I was no longer at the Stabroek News and the Catholic Standard. Then one day, I got a call from Glenn Lall. He said to me; “I want to make my newspaper better than all others, I know you can write. I want you to write for the Kaieteur News.” I remember the words of Glenn Lall very well. I always will. There is a foolish man who is afraid to use his whole name when he signs his name to his letters in the newspapers. He signs as GHK Lall. Lall has information on me that according to Lall, in three letters in the Stabroek News, makes me a contaminated media operative. I suspect that some of the Stabroek News resentment of me rubbed off on Lall because he is close to the Stabroek News editor, Anand Persaud. I saw them one day years ago, lunching together at German’s. I don’t know who or what has contaminated me but the editor-in chief of the Kaieteur News, Adam Harris and my lawyers including Nigel Hughes and Moses Nagamootoo can tell anyone that I have had huge disagreements with Lall. I have never been anybody else except me.