Postcard from the media Wild West

I am in media frontier land, in Guyana, South America, on a university exchange trip to the country where I was born. It is truly the media Wild West here.

TV is all-present in all homes. Plenty of local channels - 20-plus at the last count. They're segmented not by genre but by race and politics, like the society itself.

There are black stations (one even called Hoyte-Blackman TV), Indian stations with a diet of Bollywood films, a government station which pumps out pretty raw material, anti-government stations, and more.

The economics of some of them is simple enough. They take advantage of the US TV satellites above Guyana. It isn't hard for a budding Guyanese entrepreneur to buy a decoder card in the US for domestic use and use it here for transmission.

The Guyanese call it the 'ripe mango theory' - if a neighbour's ripe mangoes fall into your yard then it is right for you to pick them up and eat (or in this case retransmit) them! 

Broadcast journalism here varies from the bad to the simply bloody awful, with poorly trained kid reporters and cameramen who show little imagination. The truth occasionally makes an appearance but regulation is loose and almost unenforceable. Radio is one station, two frequencies, both government-controlled. 

The four national newspapers are not much better: two pro- and two anti-government. The Guyana Chronicle- cynics call it 'The Chronic' - is a low circulation paper full of economic development stories: think Pravda. The Guyana Times- cynics call it 'The Daily Jagdeo' after the president - is better. It ought to be, thanks to brand new printing presses brought in tax-free courtesy of the president.

The other two papers include a supermarket tabloid, the Kaieteur News, which is owned by an entrepreneur who goes around with armed security and whose profession is selling shoes. It has the National Enquirer approach to journalism. The Stabroek News is more subtle - as befits a pioneer of press freedom under the previous dictatorial regime. Now it is behind a paywall and, as the Guyanese say, 'suffering'.

All the papers feature news that would struggle to make it into the Oldham Chronicle. Almost all of them leave your hands dirty and a nasty taste in your mouth due to their raw politics and prejudice.

One special feature of all Guyanese newspapers is prolix letter writers - the legacy of a an impressive education system. It is a shame they are not matched by equally rigorous sub-editors. I rarely get to the end of a 1,500-word thesis.

Even cyberspace shows the fissures of the society, with some sites blatantly propagandistic and vulgar.

The one exception is the new kid on the block Demerarawaves.com (above), which provides a breaking news service on the net and email especially for the huge Guyanese diaspora outside the country. Demerarawaves has 'got' the internet.

This is election year, when fissures come into the open, sometimes with rioting. The media here in the Wild West offer a cacophony of sound but precious little range. Instead of widening choice, they are sealing people in their racial silos and keeping the racial apartheid well and truly alive on screen, on air and in print. Pity!

John Mair is a senior lecturer in broadcasting at Coventry University. He is a research fellow at the Centre for Communication Studies at the University of Guyana for the month of May 2011.