by Andrew Allen
It is typical of the way much of the media operates in the Bahamas that a story which, if any truth lies in it, is potentially the biggest for years, has surfaced only in a local gossip newspaper and in the ubiquitous 'word on the street'.
I refer, of course, to the rumoured recent finding at San Salvador of a substantial cache of treasure. The figures being floated around all suggest a value that, if realised, could seriously impact the solvency of the Bahamian government.
Yet ZNS has apparently not seen fit to bring any of this to the attention of the viewers of their nightly news, even if only to question someone in government and let them publicly dismiss the rumours.
Of course, not all rumours are worthy of media attention. But when they are both persistent and potentially corroborated by surrounding events, it becomes decidedly unjournalistic simply to ignore them.
In this instance, it is obvious that the rumours are in some way related to the expulsion of an American company that had been involved in some kind of prospecting on San Salvador.
This fact, taken together with the persistence and detail of the rumours, clearly adds to the urgency of investigation.
But in the Bahamas some of the media (especially ZNS) seem to view themselves more as PR agents than as journalists in the traditional sense. Hence, they do not investigate at all, and only present news when prompted to do so either by press release or by someone calling in.
This leads to the lamentable situation wherein the media only does its duty of keeping the public informed up to the point that doing so is in the interest of some group that is willing to expend the energy to prepare a release.
As may be expected, given our public service culture, that group is all too often the government of the day. However, in a number of instances it has been other, private interests that have tapped into this tendency in order to score some PR or commercial advantage.
Last week, figures released by a paid consultant of the Baha Mar group used ZNS to announce to Bahamians that the project is ahead of initial projections in terms of the creation of jobs and investment of capital.
While nobody blames Baha Mar for seeking to put as positive a spin as possible on their investment at Cable Beach, some questioning of their figures could and should have been done on behalf of the Bahamian public.
A listener to the news reports would go away not knowing what relation the new figures for jobs that will be created and money invested over the next two years has to the much higher figures (10,000 jobs and $1.6 billion in investment) that were being bandied about at the time of the still-secret heads of agreement.
While the latter (larger) figures seem to represent the ultimate, cumulative impact at the end of the project, their relation to the figures announced last week are not clear. Are these new figures exclusive of (in addition to) the old total figures? If so, one wonders why they would not be presented as such, by saying, for instance, that total projected spending has increased to almost $1.7 billion.
Given how much better such a presentation would come across to the public, it leaves one wondering why, if that is the correct reading, Baha Mar's release would not state so explicitly. For many of those who saw the report, it actually raises more questions than it answers. Unfortunately for the Bahamian public, ZNS' news team did nothing to fill in the gaps.
This lack of journalistic energy has to some extent been compensated for by politicians, whose antics and confrontations in parliament attract more attention among Bahamians than in most countries. In this instance it probably will not be long before government finds itself on the defensive over an issue like the contents of the Baha Mar release.
However, while this is good, politicians cannot be expected to take the lead in a way that is always in the interest of Bahamians. There have been many instances where conspiracies of silence across party lines have kept the public ignorant of important matters that should concern them.
There is no alternative to a better, more professional, curious and energetic journalist corps if we are to become a society that is armed with sufficient awareness to make sound collective decisions and hold our leaders to them.
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