Propaganda Works: the 2007 Elections

The post below this one is titled ‘And In Closing…’, suggesting my mistaken impression that on Saturday [Nov 3] night, the campaigns were over. I was really, really wrong. The campaigning for the UNC had yet to peak. On Radio Shakti (97.5 FM) the propaganda machine hit warp speed, as a relentless, strident stream of UNC propaganda roared through the airwaves. This was one of those perfect illustrations of the phenomenon of the blending of editorial and advertising content. An interview with Basdeo Panday was inter-cut with advertisements [or just sound clips] of Panday asking the crowd at Aranguez to send him off in a ‘blaze of glory’ and to go ‘with his boots on’.

The same was true—if absent zealotry and desperation—of Inshan Ishmael’s IBN (Channel 8) where Prof Vijay Narayansingh hosted the evening show along with Ishmael and another host, and calmly, rationally, tried to rip the UNCA a new one. It was revealed on this station that cars with megaphones were driving around constituencies (like St Augustine) on Sunday night announcing that an accommodation had been reached, and there was no longer a need to vote for the CoP.

The PNM, noticeably in all this, directed the faithful home to rest. Their campaigns were being taken care of by the UNC and the media. And their nests had been padded with voters years in advance. No one asked any questions about this because the media were too busy with the CoP and UNC ‘blood-feud’ and lies about Jesse Jackson, and Beenie Man and Salman Khan.

The newspapers, too, seemed to find a second propagandic wind: the coverage of the last round of meetings (in the Sunday editions) was as revealing as it was blatant. The Guardian and Newsday contrived to give each party a piece of the front page, but the Express, ironically, would divide it between the UNC and the CoP. Inside, though, things were different. In the Express, the CoP’s first article was on page 6, the PNM and UNC got seven articles in total between pages 2 and 5. In the Guardian, the CoP’s first article was at the bottom of page 4; the UNC got three articles between pages 2 and 5, and the PNM got a full page (p 5) with two stories and two colour pictures. In the Newsday, the CoP’s first article was on page 7; the PNM got one and a half, and the UNC two and a half [the Nacta poll result was published on p3, which gave the lead to the PNM, but which was really a UNC ploy.]

Overall on Sunday, I counted 75 articles devoted to politics, the PNM got 13, the CoP 10, and the UNC got 24, the other 28 were not overtly directed to any political party or analyses which addressed all three. This trend held for the last month of coverage: of 1156 articles counted, the PNM got 22 %, the CoP 22 % and the UNC got 31 % of the newspaper articles. [This excludes three days when I couldn’t get all three dailies.]

[These figures, of course, are ‘raw’ as they say in statistics, and a bit crude: the criteria were determined by me alone, and the counts were done by me alone; hence a possibility of bias and error. However, the proportions are rock solid, and were consistent during the four weeks I counted.]

The data reveal that the UNC got the lion’s share of coverage, and the PNM and CoP were about even. This does not acknowledge several things: one, the quality of coverage, whether articles were negative or positive; two, how long the articles were; three, how high-profile they were; and four, the number of pictures and positioning of the articles. All these tended to favour the PNM and UNC; the CoP received the most negative and negatively slanted articles; their articles tended to be later in the paper, and shorter; and the number of pictures and colour pictures was considerably smaller than the other two. And, of course, in the advertising (money) the CoP was dwarfed. The conclusion is that the CoP fought an uphill battle from the start, on every front, as the media were disposed to look upon them with disfavour.

This disfavour was manifest in many ways. The television coverage tended to focus on the damaging things about them—mainly of the split vote and the ‘feud’ with the UNC— rather than the issues. This is difficult to illustrate without much more space, but in the press, proof is available.

For example, on Sunday, the widely discredited Nacta poll was run on page 3 of the Newsday, and page 16 of the Express. The Guardian’s poll, which put the CoP neck and neck with the PNM was published on page 21. The editorial content in the Express, incidentally, worked in tandem with UNC advertisements, quoting a poll which predicted a UNCA landslide (27 seats). The same ad was published in the Guardian. The already cited smaller quantum of coverage and tendency to go for dirt rather than issues, and low visibility of the CoP achieved by placement, contributed to the idea of their weakness and fragility, and again, worked in tandem with UNC-A propaganda.

A more concrete illustration of how the press’s deliberate disfavour was made manifest is visible in Judy Raymond’s coverage of the election. Raymond provides a good example, because she was ‘brought on’ by the Express, therefore her contribution is of a higher value to the Express and its constituency. [I applied for the same job at the Express and did not get it.]

Raymond wrote about 12 articles between early October and November 4. [I say ‘about’ because I only have 10 on file, she might have written one or two more.] In these articles are visible differing approaches to the three parties: her posture to the PNM was respectful and lightly ironic; the UNC, sarcastic; and to the CoP her attitude is directly derived from PNM and UNC rhetoric.

Her first article, examining the PNM kickoff rally, looked everywhere but the stage: at Leroy Clarke, who was in the audience, at Colin Palmer’s book on Eric Williams, and at two fools fighting. Her article on Oct 23, which actually looks at the stage, does so with gentle irony upon ‘Sweetman Patrick’ and his Hazel:

When Mr Manning finally spoke, it was with a smirk offering a quiet word afterwards to any men in the audience who wanted to keep their wives as happy as his purported to be. The dictator nonsense had been dispelled as far as he was concerned. And it’s true his opponents’ dire warnings about his becoming Idi Amin or Hitler are absurd. No, he would be the most cuddly, benevolent dictator you could hope to meet.

She was even ironic on pointing out the mispronunciation of ‘epithomases’ in the introduction of Hazel. [BTW: is ‘any men’ in the quote above grammatical?]

Dealing with the UNC, it was the ribald theatre of the grotesque: ‘Can Denise Belfon’s bottom win votes for the UNC Alliance?’ [Oct 16]. The article focused much on the excess of the UNC campaign, and genuflecting to Panday’s considerable oratorical skills. When she did remonstrate with him, it was with the epithet ‘duck and run’—at Dookeran’s expense—at the sight of Denise Belfon’s ‘beefy hind quarters’ and at his treatment of Kamla Persad Bissessar, which was considerably understated:

Then Mr Panday came to the bone he had decided to toss [to Kamla]. The people, he said wheedlingly, are the final arbiters. What did they think of her being in charge of the ‘women’s contingent of the army of the UNC Alliance? He hadn’t even proposed it to the council yet, he confided, presumably either because he didn’t think he needed to, since, as ever he is the leader of leaders; or because he had just come up with the idea on the spot and hadn’t had time to mention it to anyone else.

Insomuch as she elected to not see the ugliness of Panday’s dealings with women, with his convictions, his allies and his lies, and the evil of Manning’s deals with criminals, the excesses in wastage, the increase in crime, violence, social decay and the deterioration of the infrastructure, like this hospitals, and Manning’s desire to change the constitution, this did not apply to the CoP leader.

With Dookeran, her judgment is less ironic, and more definite and contemptuous — tendentiously so. Focusing upon Dookeran’s propensity for green verbs and mixing metaphors on the platform, she writes [Oct 30]:

There are many kinds of intelligence, but among those required for a national leader is the sort that involves clear and rational thinking, and the way Mr Dookeran speaks doesn’t inspire confidence in his thought processes.

Dookeran’s incapacity to lead was a running theme in her articles (like Oct 14), and by Nov 4, it was a toss up between out and out campaigning and outright contempt:

And if the CoP is less guilty of dishonesty, this may be for reasons of inexperience and naivete—the last of which may well apply more accurately to the party’s leader than the integrity and honesty with which he is usually credited.


What all this says at 10 pm on Monday night, when it looks like the CoP has been properly clobbered, is that there is a good possibility (which is explained at length in my book, Breaking the News) that this the preponderance of UNC articles and the treatment of the various parties in the media was a deliberate strategy undertaken at the behest of the PNM, and with the complicity of the media, and helped by Panday to promote the rift between the CoP and UNC and take serious attention off the PNM, who sneaked off with the election, and without ever having to give an account of their governance which we’re all living in today.

Well, it worked. Gods of sufferation, receive thy sufferers—they’re begging for it, especially the Indians.