PAN-CARIBBEAN broadcast journalism will suffer a major blow next month with the closure of the BBC Caribbean Service that has been providing a most valuable package of news and views to this region for almost three decades.
This is sad news. The Caribbean Community will be the poorer for independent and reliable information since it has not yet recovered from the loss of the range and quality professional wire and radio news coverage that were a regular feature of the once vigorous Caribbean News Agency (CANA).
CANA ceased to exist, as we have known it, some ten years ago and currently offers, against the odds, a scaled-down news flow via the Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC).
While CANA was largely maintained, financially, with funding from UNESCO and a German foundation, the BBC Caribbean Service emerged as a component of the BBC World Service. Now that the new Conservative/Liberal government of Britain has decided on a drastic cost cutting policy for the BBC World Service, the Caribbean will be deprived of its varied programmes effective from March 25.
Given the recognised need for a greater public information flow, consistent with our aspirations to establish a seamless regional economy supported with enlightened functional cooperation, the impending closure of the BBC Caribbean Service is expected to be a discussion topic at the CARICOM leaders Inter-Sessional Meeting which gets underway today in Grenada.
Both host Prime Minister and CARICOM chairman, Tillman Thomas, and his Barbadian counterpart, Fruendel Stuart, who chairs the Community’s Prime Ministerial Sub-committee on CSME, are on record as expressing their interest for greater and more effective communication to the people of the region.
Today, there is no longer a functioning CARICOM Council of Information Ministers, or any showing of serious interest by governments to exercise creative initiatives to support, without strings, the Caribbean Media Corporation in order for it to be more enterprising in coverage of regional events and developments.
Nevertheless, it would be good to learn that the CARICOM leaders meeting in Grenada do have a concern in at least seeking to ascertain how best this region could benefit from the talents and resources, originally located in CANA, and now to be available from next month’s closure of the BBC Caribbean Service.
Likewise, the decision makers of the Caribbean Broadcasting Union (CBU) and One Caribbean Media (OCM) should also be forthcoming with ideas on the pooling of talents and resources to help in filling a growing void in sustained professional pan-Caribbean coverage of news and views in the interest of an informed regional public.
In contrast to the authenticity the word “Caribbean” has represented in the acronym of CANA and BBC Caribbean, media enterprises in the region that market themselves as being Caribbean-oriented have quite a challenge today with the coming closure of the BBC Caribbean Service.
For now, let the head of the BBC Caribbean Service, the veteran Trinidad-born journalist, Debbie Ransome, have the last word: “Given what we know BBC Caribbean means for providing pan-Caribbean coverage for a strong radio audience, plus the online links it provides between the Caribbean and its dispora, and the amount of goodwill it brought for the BBC from a loyal audience, clearly a void will be left. . . . ”
Rickey Singh is a noted Caribbean journalist.