KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent, Feb. 19, IWN – The BBC “is good at exposing what they believe to be other people’s alleged sins” but they are wrong in their recent allegation against Prime Minister Dr Gonsalves, he said Monday.
BBC journalist Paul Kenyon of the programme “Panorama” asked Gonsalves on an aircraft in Barbados on Sunday to respond to an allegation that investor Dave Ames took a briefcase/suitcase of money to the Office of the Prime Minister and left without it.
Gonsalves accused Kenyon and another of his colleagues of accosting him.
He said that while some persons would advocate that the equipment of media workers who take such an approach should be destroyed, he would say, “we speak to these issues.
“We just talk about them. We make sure that they can’t come and have a subtext which is looking at St. Vincent and the Grenadines as some poor backward country, whose leadership is corrupt and the powerful BBC is untouchable,” he said on Star Radio.
“Now, the BBC, apparently, is good at exposing what they believe to be other people’s alleged sins but we know from all kinds of reading about them…, they have gotten many right but they have gotten things wrong and sometimes they overreach. And this one is one they are overreaching.
“I am not going to say there are things inside their own closet that they don’t look at. But that is a separate issue; I don’t want to confuse all various things.
“But I would say to them, Kenyon and whoever the other gentleman, that on this thing they are plain wrong.”
Gonsalves said the BBC journalists “must have a particular view of St. Vincent and the Grenadines” that they don’t feel they can contact his press secretary or communications director or write to him before.
He said the journalists, who were here for four days last week, contacted him at the “last minute” on Friday.
“I am not there at the beck and call of a journalist. I just couldn’t talk to them one Friday at five-to-five or any other time that evening. I have my other responsibilities,” Gonsalves said.
But Kenyon told I-Witness News that they had failed to secure an interview with Gonsalves.
“We had asked him for an interview before and he refused, so we decided that we would tackle him on the airplane when it came to a halt…” Kenyon told I-Witness News.
“He responded by saying that the allegations were outrageous and he said we were not BBC journalists,” Kenyon further said.