Herald Media Partners

Way off the beaten radio track, I enjoyed producing election night for CNMG Television in Trinidad. Thanks to Knolly Whiskey for his great work in making the set design a reality, and to a great team of journalists and technical people at C. And respect due, of course, to the King of News/Talk, Julian Rogers, who fronted several hours of groundbreaking tv... Video did not kill the radio star!

I blog. You decide. Moyers and Olbermann - who was Goliath and who was David? No injuries reported, no giants slain. Only interesting insights into the arguments over news commentary versus screeching. Can Olbermann be added to the list of "screechers" along with O'Reilly and Limbaugh? Are they boundaries over which a good news commentator should not cross? Is this a liberal versus conservative argument (no accounting for taste, say the Romans) or is this about a commentator whose main selling point is the fact-count rather than the decibel level? Supporters distinguish Olbermann from the pack as actually being right, even prescient, about what he says about the Bush administration (his favourite food); critics say he's a liberal attack dog. But pay special attention to the interviewer. Bill Moyers proves why he's a worthy heir of the Murrow legacy at CBS - on PBS. Interviewing is 90 per cent listening. Read below and see why. By the way, Moyers himself was a news...

I thought I would reprise what I wrote back in 2002 when I was forced home by the Labour Commissioner of the Antiguan government on Feb. 1, 2002, on trumped-up allegations of working illegally in the country for eight months. I was working as the news and current affairs consultant and trainer for the independent Observer Radio. I also created and anchored a popular Sunday news review programme called The Big Issues - happily still on the air. This was my first statement on my departure and my views on Caribbean media. Much has been said about my forced exit from Antigua after I went there in April 2001 to train the staff for a new commercial radio station, Observer Radio, which has since become, according to independent survey, the leading quality radio station in the country. A lot of this comment has been couched in terms of free movement of skilled Caricom nationals and my political skill - or lack of it. Some of it has been brilliantly insightful; too much of it has been partisa...

For once, the Caribbean was integrated. Three o'clock, November 29th, 2007. Following radio news coverage on Thursday's earthquake produced some fissures and wobbling of its own. Most newsrooms, luckily, had access to the Internet. But where did we go? Not to the University of the West Indies Seismic Research Unit but to the US Geological Survey. No follow up. Not a call to anyone at UWI Seismic Unit, certainly not by any radio or television reporter in Barbados, where I was, or in a few other places I was monitoring. The coverage seemed to suffer in other countries where the journalists' lack of media experience was a greater issue than whether they'd been through an earthquake. I was appalled that in Antigua, for example, which has had far more experiences of earthquakes, it was treated as a little five-minute report inside a regular show of music and chatter (N.B. Having been live and continuous on radio through a quake and a flood there in 2001, I know how much the ...