Bahama Pundit

Commonwealth Broadcasting Association Conference in Nassau

by Larry Smith

"One of the first things to go in a coup - right after the presidential palace - is the radio and TV station - so we know broadcasting has power." -- Stephen King, director of BBC World Service Trust, speaking at the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association meeting in Nassau last week.

Seventeen years ago, in the midst of a tanking economy, a group of home-grown Muslim jihadis blew up the police headquarters in Trinidad, took over parliament and held the prime minister and many others hostage.

The second thing they did was take over the state-run television station - to announce that the government had been overthrown.

A six-day stand-off ensued with the army, accompanied by widespread looting and chaos in the capital. The prime minister and his attorney general were both shot and wounded by their captors, and dozens of others were killed during the coup attempt.

Trinidad and Tobago is a plural society. The main ethnic groups are Hindu East Indians and Christian Africans, with a small minority of Muslim Asians, but the group that mounted the 1990 coup was mostly black. It's leader was a former policeman named Lennox Philips who had converted to Islam.

This bit of recent history shows that we don't need to look far to see how our own parliamentary democracy might be threatened someday. Our formerly homogenous society is now developing a significant and exploited creole minority, not to mention a hardened criminal underclass.

Time to Leave the 2007 Election and Debate Burning Issues

by Sir Arthur Foulkes

Two friends – one Bahamian, one foreign – worked together for a while in a downtown office. At the end of every work day the Bahamian noticed that his friend cleared his desk and put everything into his briefcase. Nothing was left on the desk and nothing in the drawers.

The curious Bahamian questioned his friend, a peripatetic Jew, about this daily ritual, and he replied something like this:

“Perhaps it’s my genes or my cultural orientation, or maybe it’s just me. I don’t know. I do know that when I leave this place I may not be welcomed back the next day, and that will not be a problem for me. There’s nothing I have to come back for. I can easily walk away and never look back.”

Indeed, he was able to do just that. Despite his passionate involvement in certain aspects of Bahamian life, he would frequently over the years unceremoniously absent himself and, with equal lack of notice, simply re-appear months later.

What to do with the Broadcasting Corporation of the Bahamas?

by Larry Smith

The question of what to do with the state-owned Broadcasting Corporation of the Bahamas is once again on the front burner.

In a previous article we traced the evolution of Bahamian television (read it here) and set the stage for a look at the future.

Fact is, we could have had cable TV here in the early 1960s, but it was blocked for political reasons. With a population of only 130,000 back then, the high cost and impracticality of a national TV station didn't make sense to some, but it was insisted upon by "progressive" politicians and intellectuals - ostensibly to protect our cultural identity.

So we had to wait until 1977 for the government to implement TV, and privately-operated cable television was withheld until 1995. To make things worse, ZNS TV did little or nothing to promote Bahamian culture, but a great deal to promote Bahamian politicians.

Reforming Bahamian Broadcasting

by Larry Smith

Another general election is approaching, and - as sure as night follows day - there is rising concern over the role of the Broadcasting Corporation.

Political control of ZNS has been a hot-button issue ever since legislation was passed in 1956 to pave the way for television. Before then, broadcasting was part of the Telecommunications Department, which launched ZNS radio in 1936 as a weather service.

Bahamian television was a kind of holy grail - and our quest to grasp it took over 20 years. It was followed by another 20 years of stagflation - creative stagnation mixed with financial inflation. What should have ignited an explosion of Bahamian art and entrepeneurship, led instead to dull mediocrity and authoritarianism.

The Bahamian History of Cable TV

by Larry Smith

Back in the day, electronic entertainment for Bahamians consisted of scratchy LP records, clunky 8-track tapes, boring Zephyr-Nassau-Sunshine radio, and touch-and-go reception of a few Miami television stations.

To receive those grainy transmissions (on channels 2, 4, 7, and 10) you had to install costly rooftop antennas (a pain in the neck to take down during hurricane season) along with special “signal boosters”. And even then, bad weather would produce a blank, snow-filled screen.

In America, cable television began cramping the style of over-the-air television networks in the 1970s. The first satellite delivery of programming to cable occurred in 1976 when Home Box Office televised Mohammed Ali and Joe Frazier’s “Thrilla in Manilla”.

That same year a Stanford University professor built the first consumer direct-to-home satellite system. It was a large dish-shaped antenna used to pick up cable TV programmes distributed by content providers (like HBO) to their subscribers.

In the early 1980s Bahamians went crazy over this space-age technology . Sales of big-dish satellite receivers soared, and anyone with a passing interest in electronics could set up shop and make a fortune supplying local demand.