It was an interesting coincidence that as Lennox Grant was delivering a lecture on the late, dubiously great Patrick Chookolingo, founding editor of the Bomb and Mirror newspapers, a couple of weeks ago at Nalis, an emblematic imbroglio splattered across the pages of the mainstream press. The pressure group Citizens 4D Highway had taken ads in the T&T Guardian (which the T&T Guardian, to its credit, published) to express their ire at their previous ads (likening the country’s most famous hunger striker to a reptile) being pulled for poor taste.
The highway supporters pointed out the obvious: if someone were doing to the media what the media were doing to them (refusing them access, or sanctioning the media establishment for publishing material others found to be in poor taste), the media establishment would be organising marches, and using their editorial resources to paint whoever as monsters. Choko’s legacy is relevant to this issue, of who decides what’s acceptable in media content and how those decisions are made.
Patrick Chookolingo started his career in the pre-independence period, working for the Chronicle and Mirror, and was one of the founding editors of the Express. After he left journalism in a cloud of ignominy, he was hired by Bhadase Maraj to edit the Bomb newspaper. After Bhadase’s death, he fell out with the new management (Mr Sat Maharaj of the SDMS, and columnist in these pages), and started the Mirror, Target and Sunday Punch papers.
Those papers changed Trini journalism, revealing a national underbelly: the lewd, crude side of Trini life which had hitherto not been reported, except by calypsonians and a few novelists. They lowered the bar, so to speak, as to what constituted the “public interest” and what could be got away with under the guise of “press freedom,” and they bludgeoned the Establishment with the bar of good taste. But there were limits. Choko is best known for a famous case, the Judge’s Wife. He published a (fictional) eponymous story and was prosecuted for contempt of court, at the behest of the Law Association, which claimed he was bringing the judiciary into disrepute. He lost the case (presided over by then Justice Noor Hassanali), did a couple of weeks in jail, and lost all the way to the Privy Council.
But “bringing into disrepute” best describes the dominant element of Choko’s journalism. His history at the Bomb (and then the Mirror) was a long fusillade of barbs, spikes and stinkbombs aimed at several and sundry high in “society,” on behalf of the common man—and the commoner the better. Choko was driven (said Grant and reporters who knew him) by the desire for good stories—“good” meaning salacious, steamy, and sensational but not necessarily factual. This did not mean the weeklies didn’t sometimes spank the mainstream media fair and square, but by and large, they aimed low, and never missed.
As every editor knows, journalism is a fine balance between getting it good and getting it right; ideally a good story is truthful and titillating. As every observer of journalism knows, the profession as a whole has failed at maintaining that balance, which too often tilts to the lurid, the loutish, and occasionally the outright lie. The general posture of the media is a Zen-like detachment from the consequences of their practice.
This persistent refusal of the powerful to acknowledge their enormities fuelled a crucial element of Choko’s journalism: the class war. As the Judge’s Wife showed, his artillery was aimed at those high in the social and political echelons. This class divide defined the weekly press vis-a-vis the daily press. But more remarkable was the society, which comfortably digested this schizoid tableau: aspiring to the respectability of the upper classes, but greedily devouring the sleaze-bombs shot at them. Choko’s papers always sold well and made a profit, with little or no advertising.
If the Citizens 4D Highway imbroglio shows anything it’s that the intertwined class issue and journalistic definitions of the acceptable and the distasteful persist, vindicating Choko. “Poor taste” was behind the pulling of ads. But whose definition of taste? A few “civil society” gadflies in town? These are the same media that published “Chutney Rising,” “Sat Blocked Black Children,” photos of an underage girl who was assaulted by a rapper, broadcast a recording of the rape of a young girl, all sorts of yet unproven things about Mr Jack Warner, dubious and false stories about fake e-mails, voter padding, and commented at length on the Prime Minister’s alleged dipsomania and so forth.
Distortions of fact and general incompetence are distasteful, but ignorance is much more so. Some, like me, find it highly distasteful that journalists mispronounce names, words, and lack the most elementary general knowledge. Examples: things occur in the month of “Jana-rery,” or in “Sandy Grandy,” and “progidy” writers and scientists alike win “Noble Peace Prizes,” as shootings occur in Oh-TAH-wah, and so on. What about the broadcast, for years, of “Umbala” and “The Gladiator”? And my personal favourite, nothing is as distasteful as Trevor Sudama’s inaccurate predictions and sanctimonious bleating about politics being published in the media, despite the fact that he (with two others) brought down the government in 2001.
Apparently, broadcasters and publishers find none of the above objectionable. Thus the answer to the question (Who decides?) provides a discomfiting answer. Crucial decisions are made by a handful of people many of whom are, shall we say, not possessed of convincing qualifications to make them. This isn’t a new debate, or a local one. But the media remain sanguine and unresponsive, allowing the status quo to continue vindicating Choko.
