Vernon Daley

The Nation newspaper in Barbados has a policy against mentioning the relatives of a person who runs afoul of the law or otherwise gets entangled in some public controversy. The policy is applied across the board, whether those involved are from the aristocracy or the peasantry.

I've never been comfortable with such a rigid formula for conducting the business of news reporting but, over time, I have come to see it as a useful attempt in fostering responsible journalism.

The recent incident here involving dub poet Neto Meeks should get the media thinking about the appropriateness of dragging people into the news purely because they are prominent.

Neto is the son of two well-known personalities in this society and the media made sure there wasn't anyone living on this piece of rock who didn't know this. However, if Neto had been the son of ordinary, working-class parents, it is very unlikely their names would have been linked to his.

Why should the media have this double standard that discriminates against people who are prominent?

Maybe our journalists are just bad minded and take delight in bringing shame to the rich and famous even when there is no rational basis for doing so. Or, it could be something even more sinister. Perhaps they calculated that turning the negative spotlight on two prominent people would sell a few more papers or hook a couple more listeners and viewers.

Whichever it was, it didn't seem to matter that the parents were somehow being tarnished for any wrong that their son might have committed.

As far as I know Neto is a man in his early 30s and therefore would have long ago assumed responsibility for his own actions as an adult. What right do the media have to be tying him to his parents merely because they are prominent people?

Let me say that I know Neto personally. We were at university together and even sat as members of a group that attempted to start a community newspaper. As I remember it, the group didn't even make it to the first publication but I found him, at that time, a decent fellow.

I cannot say how he has since conducted his life. However, what I do know is that it is unfair to plaster his parents' names over news reports because he has had a run-in with the law.

No doubt there are legitimate circumstances in which a person's relatives might be mentioned in the news if he or she has been caught in a public controversy. Perhaps this might be done to expose some hypocrisy on the relatives' part or point to their own culpability in the wrongdoing.

The decision to publish their names, however, should never turn on the mere fact of their prominence.

The media need to develop some guidelines on this matter. Those guidelines need not be as rigid as those at the Nation newspaper but some way needs to be devised to correct this thoughtless way of reporting.

The intelligent response

Nobel Prize winning scientist Dr. James Watson has created a stir around the world by suggesting that white people are more intelligent than black people. Despite scientific evidence that has debunked that theory, it still survives and will continue to do so until black nations figure out how to shake off poverty and get ahead in the world.

As black people, let's not be emotional about this. Let's offer an intelligent response to those like Dr. Watson by organising our societies to be prosperous and peaceful. Until we do that, I'm afraid there will always be fertile ground for these racist theories to grow wild.