Archive for July 4th, 2010

Desmond Seales

The news of Desmond Seales’ death hit me hard on a personal basis. Desmond was one of the mostmemorable characters I ran into during my brief stay in Cayman. It didn’t take long after I arrived to figure out that he was a colorful figure who might have lived by P.T. Barnum’s famous quip that there was no such thing as bad publicity.

Desmond was a throwback to a different era of journalism. Among the milder epithets hurled at him at times was that of “yellow journalist”. To hear his detractors describe him, you would quickly conclude that he never let the facts get in the way of a good story. His defenders would argue that he was the only established Caymanian journalist who wasn’t afraid to poke a figurative stick in the eye of any of the resident “powers that be”. Certainly, he had a habit of making himself unpopular with whoever held the reins of power at a given time.

Not long after I arrived on island I made myself unpopular among some in the Caymanian news community by making clear my reservations about the formation of a local “media council”. I felt then (and still feel now) that the actual object was to gang up on Desmond and make him persona non grata in hopes that marginalizing him would relieve pressure from the government on other media outlets.

The council never got off the ground, but I’ve never regretted taking that stand, especially since I’ve noticed that “self governing” media councils are a popular idea among Caribbean governments hoping to muzzle annoyingly independent news outlets by letting self-censorship take over from government censorship. If a government can function without the oversight of an active free press without worries about embarrassing stories coming to light it doesn’t really matter whether that’s because of government censorship or a press that’s unwilling (or afraid) to report on them; the public is still poorly served.

Desmond was indeed a bundle of contradictions. He loved to trumpet his devotion to reporting all the news of Cayman “without fear or favor”. Yet, his own business dealings often left him open to accusations that he was in fact beholden to one set of power brokers or another. He published columns from diverse sources, such as Gordon Barlow, whose curmudgeonly diatribes on Cayman’s social divisions surely mean an increase in antacids and blood pressure medicines in certain quarters whenever they appear. However, Desmond also had room for a local preacher, local businessmen and a proud native son. Giving voice to those who might in some way feel voiceless were it not for his outlet was something he did without fear or favor.

Of course, it was irony of the highest order that Desmond wanted to portray himself as the voice of the “little man” while running his own business in a manner that caused constant turnover and left more than one employee embittered and vowing some sort of revenge.

Any remembrance of Desmond would not be complete without mentioning that while he loved to point to shady dealings around Cayman he had a few skeletons of his own hanging in the closet.

In his own way, Desmond was athrowback to an earlier time: he might have found kinship with Benjamin Franklin, who before becoming one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, set type, drew cartoons and wrote witty and learned essays for his own newspapers and magazines.
Others who think less kindly of him, might compare him to William Randolph Hearst, Junior, who once famously told a photographer (pre Spanish American War), “You provide the pictures, I’ll provide the war.”

For myself, I think of Desmond as more in league with the original Hollywood movie makers such as Harry Cohn, Mack Sennett and Louie B. Mayer, who bent the rules and broke the molds. Desmond never made it to that level of wealth and influence, but in my opinion he was a
kindred spirit. Certainly his willingness to embrace the Internet and attempts to tap it’s potential was as grandiose and visionary as anything theHollywood bosses ever dreamed up.

I remember fondly a night at Durty Reid’s when we shared a table and maybe one too many beers and he spelled out his vision of a Caribbean version of “USA Today” that would help unify the region. I don’t remember the details, but, I do remember that it was breathtakingly compelling. It may not happen in my lifetime, but I certainly hope it does.

It’s ironic that Desmond’s passing comes at a time when the party in power is renewing calls for media “self-regulation” and seeking to to overturn the ability of political opponents, reporters or the merely curious to file anonymous freedom of information requests. At a time when independent voices are more needed than ever, the loudest and most independent voice in Caymanian media is gone.

However imperfect he may have been, Desmond Seales was certainly one of a kind. In the words of Shakespeare, “He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again”

Mike Hennessy is the former news director of Rooster 101

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