Is what I am reading critical reporting or cynical ranting?

The author, though anonymous to a casual reader of the printed Press, is named in its online version. Oddly, transparency around ownership of the Guernsey Press comments series is offered to the internet generation only. Why is such discrimination countenanced?

Nonetheless, the piece in question is attributed to the Guernsey Press editor. And like his predecessor, who is a fellow alumnus of local private education, he seems to struggle with initiatives which seek to introduce progressive change within the state education sector.

With one writing regularly in the Opinion column and the other submitting a regular, full-page spread as a freelance journalist, is the Guernsey Press doubling down?

Might their apparent shared antipathy towards the Bailiwick’s transformation to a non-selective educational system stem from disapproval borne by a lingering loyalty for the status quo associated with a past educational era?

The piece employs a journalistic device which yet again enables the perpetuation of negative narrative around developments concerning the transformation of the education system. It postulates what a ‘cynic’ might think by rekindling a fallacious claim which has long contaminated reasonable debate about education on this island. Specifically, that the central message to be drawn from the 2015/16 consultation, ‘Your schools, your choice’, was ‘to leave selection well alone’ and furthermore that this was ‘ignored by the Education department’.

And the column goes on to claim the ‘cynic’ can deduce that the consultation ‘did not fit with the reformation agenda’ and that this episode, played out by the then Education Committee, ‘became a byword for government duplicity’.

No mention in the column that the survey was a consultation exercise and not a statistical survey capable of extrapolation. Nor that it contained the views of self-selected respondents, who between them accounted for less than 5% of eligible islanders.

Misrepresentation of the findings from this consultation has its origins in this very paper over four years ago. An article entitled Education has ignored results of public consultation featured in the 3 February 2016 edition of the Press. It spawned three misguided readers’ letters two days later and countless others ever since. These and subsequent negative Press coverage has seeded a plethora of letters lambasting several Education committees over the years.

Indeed, part of a letter entitled Deputy has a selective memory, published just last week, regurgitates the same tired misconception as if it were fact.

Of course the Press is perfectly entitled to provide articles which appeal to ‘cynics’ as, undoubtedly, they form a portion of their readership. But, I believe, the real message behind this Opinion contribution was a reaffirmation of resistance to any enterprise which aims to remove the anachronistic and discredited selective education system.

Any instance of a possible negative slant by a Guernsey Press article poses a real question for its readership, namely: is what I am reading critical reporting or cynical ranting?

And it leads to a more general question, related to the amplification of political apathy and the promotion of distrust in our deputies: do some journalistic contributions in the Guernsey Press ‘provide plenty of sustenance for cynics’?

JON LANGLOIS

Grandes Mielles Lane,

Guernsey.