Not for nothing has television been dubbed the ‘boob tube’ or ‘idiot box’. And this, long before anyone was able to watch the sports news on TV6! Bad as it is, the CCN channel is not alone. Not just in vision but in the voice and print media as well, …
Read More »Media Monitor: Kamla’s choice, Anil’s voice and putting party before country
It’s an ill wind, we have long heard, that blows nobody good. Ditto, I think, Anil Roberts. Which may be why Kamla Persad-Bissessar has seen it fit to return him to the national parliament as a senator. If every current UNC Member of Parliament were somehow able to make a …
Read More »Media Monitor: UNC’s arresting image and Maraj’s masterclass on Kamla’s figures of speech
If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, we have heard a million times, bamboozle them with bullshit. Ralph Maraj is the exemplar par excellence of that message. On the post-4pm news segment of the i95.5FM afternoon show early last week, Maraj leapt to the defence of UNC Political Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar. …
Read More »Best: Easy like Sunday morning; relaxed Rowley comes to terms with Trini reality
In jeans and tee-shirt. With push-toe rubber or leather slippers on his feet. That, I imagined, was how Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley, interviewed by Natalee Ligoure before fielding questions from the public on i95.5fm on Sunday, was dressed. In my mind’s eye, I saw the Mason Hall native walking …
Read More »What’s in a name—Pt 2: Black Power, Calypso, Soca and pumpkin vine
What, a young British schoolboy was asked somewhere in the early 1980s, is Black Power? His response was a name: ‘Clive Lloyd.’ As the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago emerges from Carnival and begins a largely muted celebration of the anniversary of the epoch-making 1970 Black Power Revolution, some other …
Read More »Best: What’s in a name? Calypso’s losing battle with the new identity normal
When Terri Lyons led Karene Asche and Heather Mac Intosh in a clean sweep for women in the National Calypso Monarch competition on Carnival Thursday, it may have reminded many of Denyse Plummer’s 1988 boast that woman is boss. However, for those willing to go back two more years to …
Read More »Media musings—Pt 2: Opinion, reporting and commentary; the reason I write
“If you believe only in facts and forget stories,” Cassandra Clare writes in Lord of Shadows, “your brain will live but your heart will die.” So here is a short story that illustrates, I think, how the brain keeps itself alive, serendipitously collecting its own facts. Green Corner, Port-of-Spain, circa …
Read More »Media musings: I tweet, therefore I am? Facts, truth and reader education
Lloyd Best used to say that Trinidad and Tobago is a country where people walk about with their heads empty. That may explain why, for so many of us Trinis, facts are sacred things. “Facts are facts,” India’s Jawaharlal Nehru once declared, “and they will not disappear on account of …
Read More »Media Monitor: Chalkdust in deh face? And who will guard the i95 guards?
You would not have thought so on Revue opening night but the Mighty Chalkdust is going to be in the Big Yard once more on Thursday night. Still singing and competing mere weeks short of his 80th birthday, he produced a performance of “Murder frenzy” which would have gone down …
Read More »Media Monitor: customer satisfaction and reporter work ethic clash on CCN and TTT
Ahahn! At last! It only take about 70 years. Too late fuh Blakie buh not fuh we! And de timing perfick; it only have a week or two to go before dis year Carnaval. (Big band music blassing. De tune is a famous 1954 classic by de now dead kaisonian …
Read More »Message to the media; musings on premature loss of a Laker as great as great Kobe
Basketball legends never die, a friend joked to me on WhatsApp last Sunday, they just keep hitting fadeaways. And confessing that he had felt physically sick when he first heard the news of Kobe Bryant’s untimely death in a helicopter crash earlier in the day, he explained that, for him, …
Read More »Media Monitor: On T&T English, the US Senate’s brown tongues and crossing Trump
In the Senate impeachment trial of Donald J Trump, Adam Schiff spoke good, very good. (I could have wrote ‘was very good’ but that wouldn’t be American in any way, shape or form.) A classy, clearly highly educated advocate, Schiff doubtless impressed all with his eloquence and general delivery. He …
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