The Tribune

By TYLER MCKENZIE

THE missteps by the administration of Prime Minister Philip “Brave” Davis in response to the international travel advisories have been staggering – so much so that we have now had a new round of reporting internationally, this time highlighting how Mr Davis wants to hide murders from the front page of our country’s newspapers.

Let us skip back to when the US travel advisory was first announced. That there has been criticism of the newspapers reporting this at all – which is absurd, it is news about our country and should be recorded – but the way in which the two main newspapers reported it was restrained. The Tribune featured the alert, but not on its front page at the time, while the Guardian’s first mention was the lead story – but in terms of comments from the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Tourism, Chester Cooper, saying there was no elevated risk to tourists.

Day after day following the warning, there seemed to be some press conference or another by either government or police or people in the tourism industry shouting loudly “WE ARE SAFE” in one form or another. The newspapers, and television, and other media in the country duly reported on those pronouncements.

If the response was loud, it was because the authorities made it so, not through any sensationalism on the part of the newspapers.

And just when that seems to be subsiding, up comes the Prime Minister with his call for murders not to be on the front page.

Now, after the backlash, he has tried to suggest his comments needed to be taken in context, so let us include his comments here for clarity.

“Right now, the hotels are seeing some fall off, but more importantly, those who are in the hotels today, they’re not coming out into the community,” he said yesterday during a meeting with religious leaders.

“They’re not going to the restaurants, for example. They’re not going sightseeing as they used to.”

He went on: “I want to call upon the press to be sensitive. I think they should see their role as trying to help the country. I’m not saying not to report, but where you report, it may make a difference.

“And all I ask them to do is check, check to see where their crime report is. Check Trinidad, check the United States, just check and see where it is. It’s never on the front page.

“But every bullet that is fired appears to be front page news on all of our daily news. And what happens, AP picks it up, Reuters pick it up and what happens, and it’s continuing.”

When a reporter asked about his own history with regard to billboard signings announcing the number of murders under the FNM, Mr Davis said: “That’s the past. I am looking forward. What I am saying now is, I now have evidence that this is impacting how it’s accepted in the international community. I didn’t have evidence then on how it was accepted, and now that I know how it is accepted, I will say to the press, just be responsible in how you report to ensure that you don’t harm your country.”

So, that’s what he said. He has not presented the evidence he talks about in regard to the impact of such matters in the international community.

Mr Cooper, meanwhile, popped up while launching two advertising campaigns to restore faith in The Bahamas for tourists and talked about analytic showing the amount of coverage of the international travel advisories, and said that only eight percent of online coverage about the country is “negative” and was losing momentum.

Mr Cooper also talked about how coverage “intertwined” coverage of the advisory about The Bahamas with a travel warning about Jamaica. That is not the case with local coverage here in The Bahamas, and he seems to be referring to such things as a CBS report talking about crime in the region, which mentioned both in a report, but clearly spelled out the difference.

In any case, none of his analytics have been released for public consumption either, so we have to take his word for it, and Brave’s word for his evidence too.

Mr Davis talked of how other papers internationally did not have murders on the front page – but again did not cite which newspapers. The media here already knew that was not really true, but did its due diligence anyway and went off to look for examples only to find, surprise surprise, many newspapers with murders on the front page.

So on top of the international coverage of the murder rate that started this year off at such a pace, we now have had international coverage of the Prime Minister trying to sweep such matters under the carpet. All of which is in response to very routine coverage of a travel advisory by the US.

As I mentioned in a previous column, that advisory was itself perfectly straightforward, just telling people to practice “increased vigilance in ‘Over the Hill’ area (south of Shirley Street) where gang-on-gang violence has resulted in a high homicide rate primarily affecting the local population”.

Local population, you’ll note. I highlighted that before, I’ll highlight it again.

I would love if the Prime Minister’s reaction had been focused on some of that local population, I must say, but no, it seems to be all about the tourists. The call to move the stories off the front page was not for the impact here at home, but abroad, as if the murders would somehow magically not be noticed the second they were not on the front page. Stories are still posted online and shared, details of murders still circulate on social media, the US Embassy is not going to suddenly not notice if the murder is on page three rather than page one.

This was not a simple case of the Prime Minister misspeaking either. He talks of evidence. The government has done analytics. That means someone was tasked with going and finding this out or put that evidence into Mr Davis’ hand and he decided to run with it. This is a premeditated effort to put pressure on the media who are doing nothing other than their job.

Worse, it fits into a pattern of not being forthcoming with the facts. That Freedom of Information implementation is deep in the long grass. We still do not know which Parliamentarians failed to follow the law on public disclosures last year. Questions tabled by the FNM in Parliament go unanswered or get pushed around in a circle of someone else needs to answer. There are many contracts awarded that have not been revealed to the public.

Back when he was defending the billboards put up by the PLP in 2012, Mr Davis said: “We cannot hide the truth. Are we about hiding the truth?”

Well, Mr Prime Minister, are we?