BACK TO THE FUTURE AT TTT

THE PNM’s newly-revealed debt of $572,783.75 to the taxpayer-owned electronic media company is a throwback to earlier times of political abuse.

In 2010, when the PNM was voted out of national office, the political party left an unpaid bill of more than $800,000.

Despite several attempts, including threats of legal action, the PNM refused to pay the sum.

When he became Prime Minister in 2015, Dr. Keith Rowley publicly acknowledged the debt.

Since then, the PNM’s fortunes have evidently turned around dramatically, to the point where its city headquarters are being rebuilt at a cost estimated by some to be around $100 million.

When the PNM returned to power in 2015, more than $250,000 was spent on an exercise that led to the renaming of the company from Caribbean New Media Group (CNMG) to Trinidad and Tobago Television (TTT).

TTT was the original – and sentimental – name of the public-owned company, but most of the generation with emotional ties to that organisation has since passed on.

The times have changed, but the PNM’s entrenched and wretched culture of using the State media as a political plaything has not.

The Maraval Road entity is essentially a mouthpiece for the party and is commandeered to provide coverage of political meetings and media conferences and to broadcast its partisan messages on newscasts.

In all of this, the television station’s audience is negligible.

A survey two years ago found that TTT’s viewership is routinely less than Tobago’s Channel 5, a community station that broadcasts to the island’s tiny population.

Opposition parliamentarian Dr. Roodal Moonilal last November was told – in response to a question in the House of Representatives – that the PNM had not paid for several identified political broadcasts.

Asked about outstanding payments for the broadcasts, Communications Minister Symon de Nobriga responded: “Not applicable.”

In addition to electioneering broadcasts, the State media has been used in other ingenious ways to put the hex on the political opposition.

On the eve of the 2010 general election, for example, the TV station was directed to broadcast a FIFA meeting in Florida at which a top football executive delivered a broadside against Jack Warner.

A former company chairperson had stressed that TTT must be “a single source of truth of government’s effort and policies.”

In other words, a well-oiled propaganda machine!

TTT is heavily subsidised by hard-pressed taxpayers, with some $145 million being allocated over the past eight years to keep the broadcaster on the air.

In 2005, around $111 million was spent on retrofitting the company.

Interestingly, the waste of taxpayers’ funds and blatant abuse of a media organisation do not elicit critical reviews, not even from industry watchdogs and sanctimonious commentators.