Following is an edited version of Observer editor-in-chief Paget deFreitas’ address to the Press Association of Jamaica’s Veterans Lunch held last Wednesday at J Wray and Nephew in Kingston.

HAVING been drafted to talk at a function honoring journalists who, I suspect, have been in the profession for at least five years — given what is happening today you can never be sure — I was reminded of a remark I had read by a Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, and quoted by an American media critic, Bruce W Sanford in his book Don’t Shoot the Messenger.

Said the Dane: “If I were a father and had a daughter who was seduced, I would not despair for her. I would hope for salvation. But if I had a son who became a journalist and remained one for five years, I should give him up.”

I am not sure what Mr Kierkegaard’s position would be if it were his son who was seduced and the daughter became the journalist. But the sentiment, in some respects, too many in fact, stands as a metaphor for how the media — if not their individual actors — are viewed in the world today, and not least in Jamaica.

The harsh truth is that modern society is inundated with media and their messages. Jamaica is no exception.

I have recently been asking myself to define the most profound development of the 20th century. All of my males friends, who, like me, are beginning to stare hard at veteran status, have been insisting on the advent of Viagra.

It seems to me, though, that as crucial to humankind — male and female — as has been Pfizer’s product, it faces a substantial challenge from the seeming omniscience of media and the speed and immediacy with which media impact people’s lives. Information is flashed around the world at the speed of electricity… the images are real time.

Indeed, in my own lifetime as a journalist I have moved from having to install monster-sized electro-mechanical telex and teleprinter machines, with punch tapes, running at 25 bauds a minute, to now turning up with super-thin, super-fast lap-tops, plugging them into the telephone line and working as though I had not left the office. The Olivetti Leterra 32 portable typewriter I bought with my first real salary is these days a curiosity piece among young people… although I tell myself it was only the other day that I made that purchase.

The point is that in modern society we can’t, or perhaps don’t want to, escape media. In our own society this access is not only via three daily newspapers, a dozen or so radio channels and two free-to-air TV channels, the cinemas and so on. It is via the Internet, every cable channel that is available here and every newspaper, magazine or other publication that comes into this market.

Is this a good or bad thing? To what purpose are all these images? How do they affect our lives — for good or bad? And in this cornucopia of media, how are we, the gatekeepers, performing.

In Jamaica, there are critics aplenty. The media, in the view of the loudest voices, are contributing more than their fair share to creating a social wasteland of fear and doubt — frightening people into a national paralysis.

For my colleagues in the Jamaican media — don’t despair. We are not alone in this vision of us as social predators, callous and callused. Across Europe and North America there has long been a similar debate on the role, relevance and impact of the media and the value they serve.

Listen to American media critic, Todd Giltin, in his book Media Unlimited: “The news is not in any simple way a mirror on the world; it is a conduit for ideas and symbols, an industrial product that produces packages of ideas and ideologies and serves, consequently as social ballasts, though at times a harbinger of social change.

The news is a cognitive warp. The world is this way; the media make it appear that way.

Echoes of John Maxwell?

And since we are into self-flagellation today, try this one on for size — the remarks of a former US newspaper editor, Kurt Luedtke, who wrote the film, Absence of Malice.

He told a conference of the American Society of Newspaper Editors: “There are good men and women out there who will not stand for office, concerned that you will find in them flaws or invent them. Many people who have dealt with you wish they had not. You are capricious and fearsome and you are feared because there is never any way to know whether this time you will be accurate or whether you will not. And there is virtually nothing we can do about it.”

Mr Luedtke was not speaking of the Observer… And the Jamaican media, I would venture.

In the face of all the critique and criticism of the media, there is the real question: do we, on balance bring value to our society and its people?

I, for one, do not subscribe to this increasingly fashionable sport of media derision, and a seemingly growing demand by a powerful and influential minority for a sanitised reality. Not a balanced picture of the world, but the unblemished side of its face. Add make-up, as you are at it.

Which, of course, is not to abrogate responsibility. For a free press in a free society has common interests, if not always a symbiotic relationship, with its host community.

There is, it seems to me, an unwritten compact between the media and the society which starts with those shared interests — the right to free speech, the right to hold and to exchange ideas, which are the foundations of democracy.

Essentially, what the press does is to superimpose upon these rights, these freedoms, the appropriate technology — the printing press, radio and television transmitters, desktop publishing systems and so on — to give yourself reach. In the absence of the technology, the press would largely be like the town crier, capable of reaching only the immediate audience that is in the range of his voice. We would be the pamphleteer with the limited distribution of his tracts.

The essence of the compact is that the society gives us access in exchange, primarily, for a fundamental undertaking. That is for the press to be the watchdog of government and other centres of influence so that there is no systematic abuse of power. Essentially, it is about ensuring quality in governance. We do, I think, a very reasonable job of this.

This does not presume some monolithic approach by the press. For the larger principle assumes that in this construct there will, at times, be different arms attending to the interests of specific segments of society. Advocacy, therefore, has its place.

The other key element of the compact, is related to the first. It is that the society expects that when that right to free speech falls under stress, the press with its capacity for reach and even noise, will come to its support. Which is also in the fundamental interest of the free press, and media in general.

The issue that appears to be emerging in Jamaica, the basis of the current debate, is how to balance this relationship, which, by and large, has worked well for either side.

My own sense is that this debate is not about the press or media per se.

Rather, it is society in dialogue with itself about fundamental issues of direction and relationships. Although the media as an institution cannot see itself only as mirror. It is, in fact, part actor. Nonetheless, in this process neither is media, in McLuhan’s notion, the message. Neither is the news a cognitive warp or a manipulated product fashioned to fit some corporate identity or some accountant’s or editor’s perspective of the world.

The news, by and large, is the reality, reflected with all our human and societal and human frailties — my own, and perhaps even yours. Which is to say that there are, occasionally, mistakes. And there will be disagreements over degrees and emphases.

Yet the news is anchored in the truth, which is the currency of our trade.

We feel that it is a debate worth engaging. For while the free press cannot, and must not, sacrifice the right to be bold and aggressive, providing its audience with an accurate picture of the events of the day, its reporting has to be textured and contextual. It has to portray the society in the fullness of its existence. Its hopes, its aspirations, its achievements. The desires of all its people.

A free press must be careful of pandering to those with opaque, ethereal notions of reality, who would retreat into a stratosphere where real people with warts and sores and dirty fingernails do not exist.

There is a final point relating to this compact between the free press and society. Hatred of the media, leading the unraveling of this compact is, ultimately, to the detriment of the society.

For it would be the removal of the first rampart in the defence of free speech, posing grave dangers to democracy.

If anything, the debate, and the pursuance of these shared interests, should be towards expanding the freedom of the media, which would be to continue the work of all the veterans who helped make what we have today possible.

Indeed, it is partly through the tensions that we now experience that societies evolve.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that whatever we think is bad in Jamaica, and however much we may think that the media have contributed to it, it would have been infinitely worse in the absence of a free press.

Barbara Gloudon, the Observer columnist and perceptive social commentator, often quotes the French writer and philosopher, Albert Camus: “A free press can be bad, but a press that is not free can be nothing but bad.”