What do you want from your daily paper? That’s what readers of Granma, Cuba’s biggest daily, were asked on Friday last week. In countries where the press is independent and free, trying to find out what readers, viewers or listeners think is something all media outlets do all the time to try and improve their product. But it’s not so common in Cuba.
I know what I want from my media; I want it to be witty, irreverent and challenging. I want it to hold the government to account and ask difficult questions. I want it to publish different points of view and investigate abuses of power. I want it to make me laugh and make me think. I want to read news, not stories about the same old issues recycled time and time again. I want the media to respect my intelligence with honesty, transparency, imagination and ideas. Britain’s media is one of the things I miss most about my home country.
I also want the media to take part in the national debate. People all over the world were fascinated by the process leading up to September’s referendum on independence in Scotland – many considered it one of the most open, transparent and democratic debates they’d seen. That wouldn’t have been possible without the media being as free as it is in the UK. If our papers, radio and TV were run by the party or parties in government, only one view would have been published, only one perspective aired.
Similarly, if the government controlled the press in the United States, the recent spate of editorials in the New York Times challenging the US government’s policy towards Cuba would never have been published.
The Granma questionnaire poses some interesting questions. Is the information we publish truthful? Is it up-to-date? Is it new? Is it written in an original way? Is Granma a quality newspaper? Do the same issues get covered again and again? What would you like Granma to be like in the future?
These are challenging issues and suggest the Granma editor really is interested in readers’ views. Will we see the results of the Granma survey published? I hope so. Will we see, in a few months, Granma looking like The Guardian, El Mundo or The Washington Post? Perhaps that’s too much to ask. Or is it?