OH! Praise the almighty deities, and ring the bell for freedom of the press. I am giving thanks to all of my fellow One Caribbean Media (OCM) shareholders who voted resolutely to reject the proposed board appointees by the current Government.

Without naming them, and avoiding casting any aspersions on either person (who are established entrepreneurs and citizens in their own right), they stained themselves by taking basket with this current dangerous administration. In so doing, a clear message, millions strong, was sent-that citizens, when threatened, will riot: with the ballot, by proxy and in person.

Calling out the elephant in the room, the current PNM cannot be allowed to meddle in the freedom of the press. They have their arm in i95.5, where the Prime Minister goes to wash his mouth. And that’s all well and good, as one can turn to another station or just listen to the blissful silence.

However, those two proposed directors were being sent there to censor what the media publishes, broadcasts and shows on its news. They were being sent there to micromanage the media.

Where they are there to seek the State interest, they should be limited to TTT, which generally has nothing to show. Their news is all good where the Government is concerned.

This Government has shown that it will victimise you if you don’t sing from their hymn book. You could be the president of the Industrial Court on a course in a faraway land, and if they feel that you will rule against them and your contract comes up for renewal- well, it’s sayonara (Japanese for goodbye) for you.

You could be an independent senator, and if you write against them, they will call the President for you.

Let it be known, like the court-and I mean the Privy Council (distinct from the CCJ)-the media remains the last bastion of defence ordinary citizens have. Only the media will investigate corruption. It was the media that blasted the Reshmi Ramnarine appointment to the SSA; and it was the same media which blew the lid off the 100-times-worse CEPEP-style running of the SSA under the PNM.

It is the media that highlights the horrid conditions people in St Julien’s Village face, who are using a boat to get to the other side of their village, because for all of the millions spent on roads and bridges highlighted in the Ministry of Works and Transport propaganda, there was not a penny to buy a plank for their bridge in 100 years-so, it collapsed.

You think any Government appointee would sit quietly and allow to be freely published pictures of how impoverished some people are, who live in terrible roads and in landslips? Or letters to the editor about how terrorised people are by a tyrannical property tax?

No; they (the Government-proposed board appointees) were being put there to suppress bad press.

But, my fellow shareholders, the million strong repelled them into oblivion.

Bless you all: attack with full force, using the untrammelled right to publish!

Linda Capildeo St James