JAMAICA | Who Says No Now? RJRGleaner Axes Its Editorial Guardians as Illiberalism Rises
Deborah Hickling Gordon Ph.D
KINGSTON, Jamaica, November 10, 2026 | By Deborah Hickling Gordon Ph.D| I trust that the RJRGleaner Group has a strategy worth its salt in light of "structural adjustment." Two senior media executive roles, the Deputy General Manager, News and Sports, and the Editor-in-Chief of The Gleaner, have been made redundant.
A critical manager in charge of procuring and producing local content has also been axed. I write about the posts, not the people. Milton and Moya, who held these roles, were first my colleagues and later, at different points, my supervisors, and I think highly of them both as people and as professionals.
The local content manager was another adept colleague professional. That regard should not cloud the argument. My question is what the removal of these posts says about where Jamaican media is heading, and what it may cost our democracy.
The economics are real
It must be economics. The Group reported a net loss of $907.18 million (a loss before taxation of $901.53 million) for the financial year ended March 31, 2026, wider than the $663.72 million loss of the year before. That is no laughing matter, and no one should pretend otherwise.
Yet to cut off the heads of the RJRGleaner news serpent is to move the Group away from what has defined it for more than a century: combined reputations for credibility and reliability as providers of news, information and current affairs to and about Jamaica and its people.
Historically, our most senior broadcast news leads and generations of print editors-in-chief have been legendary, shaping our national trajectory as well as recording it. These staff movements were not the first, and it seems not the last. Earlier this year an experienced executive producer was made redundant and even a CEO was frozen out.
Media structures and the illiberal threat
Former editor at Radio Jamaica (RJR) Milton Walker, and former editor at the Gleaner Moya Thomas
When news organisations earn the ire of successive political administrations, in an environment that has drifted towards illiberalism, that is a measure of their importance to maintaining, strengthening and building our democracy.
It is not a sign of their irrelevance. The quiet pushback undergirded by experience that no one sees - refusing to accept placed stories by boards of directors or political actors; the balance with commercialism; and a raft of ethical decisions among them, is critically important.
In an era where the nation's Opposition is being silenced in Parliament; independent, informal media workers are being shamed in the Senate; communication forms have increasingly become a weapon of choice: and incentives are readily available to cause them to be armed, experienced, steady hands are required as a counterforce.
Media structures matter here. Who owns, who leads, and who is empowered to say no inside a newsroom decides whether that pressure is resisted or absorbed. RJR and The Gleaner, as separate entities and since their conjoining, have jealously guarded their democratic role.
Removing the executive posts that embody that role is another structural, institutional blow to guarding our democracy. Liberalisation without preparation has become weaponised formalisation.
A generation-long transformation
Both the Gleaner and RJR have formed the backbone of the Jamaican media sector for decades, cumulatively over two centuries. Both are institutions. So too have been their editorial leads. Change has been necessary and constant over this time.
The question is, for Jamaica, how to honour tradition while simultaneously embracing modernity in ways that are fit for purpose in protecting our democracy and the dynamism of our rich culture - including the preservation of its historical relevance.
Media change moves in cycles. Roughly every 30 to 40 years since the late nineteenth century, just over a generation, media technology, production and distribution have shifted in step with changes in the global political economy. Every country feels these shifts directly, and differently.
Through the current transition, local traditional media, now corporate, have been buckshuffling to keep shareholders and advertisers satisfied while keeping up the appearance of affinity with their communities and target markets. Meanwhile, a generation or two of audiences has migrated online completely.
Over the last 40 years, Jamaica's traditional media metamorphosed from institutions with a strong mandate for social order and social purpose into an industry: a sector of production and labour concerned with goods and services.
The 1997 shift from public service broadcasting to commercial broadcasting, television as an enterprise financed mainly by advertising, brought sweeping changes in sensibility, behaviour and practice. My own work has focused on broadcasting rather than the newspaper business, but the press was swept up in the same currents.
Liberalisation without preparation
All traditional media were caught in what I call the period of "liberalisation without preparation," from the late 1980s to about the 2020 pandemic. Across the cultural and creative sectors, media included, changes and contradictions took hold in seven areas: commerce, creative work, convergence, conduits, content, copyright and consumption.
These are the seven Cs of the cultural and creative industries. I frame it this way deliberately, because one of the period's defining changes was that media came to be classified globally as part of the cultural and creative sector we know today.
The period produced corporate realignments, out of which the RJR Communications Group was formed in 2002. It saw subscriber cable television rise and fall, partnerships and mergers, brutal and combative competition, a turn from information to profit as the driver, and audiences recast as markets.
All of this happened with slothful, anaemic and unresponsive policy behind it. The decline of big media in Jamaica is complex and structural.
Much of it comes down to two things: clueless executive management who have never truly understood the intangibles, the ebb and flow of a zeitgeist, decades old media cultures, traditions and sensibility that characterise media practice and output; Shadow-boxing boards of directors who do not see the information and culture forests for the commercial trees.
The second is the unequivocal neglect of the modernisation of information public policy.
Decent work and the neglect of talent
Decent work traditions in the creative industries also comes into the question of democracy. Over the past 30 years, much has been invested in valuable media infrastructure. Far less attention has gone to human capital development and to genuinely integrating "talent" into media business models.
Journalists, editors, producers and presenters are creative workers whose judgement, standards and institutional memory are what make news credible. When the people and posts that carry those standards are treated as costs to be cut rather than capacities to be built, a newsroom loses the craft that separates journalism from content.
The question is, how does this value measure up against the cost of salaries? This is particularly intriguing in an organisation that has more chief executives than there are 'Indians'.
Decent creative work, meaning secure, fairly rewarded, professionally developed and free in its expression, is not a luxury for good times. It is the condition under which media workers can hold power to account.
A workforce kept precarious is more easily intimidated and more inclined to censor itself. Senior editorial leaders are part of that protection: they stand between the reporter and the pressure. When it comes to Decent Work standards, from the hushed whispers of its corridors, the RJR Group's reputation has long been found wanting.
A new phase, and a hunger for credibility
A new generation of media use began with the pandemic. Changing technology, platformisation, shifting markets among audiences and advertisers, the era of King Content, and social media pressures have forced not only mergers but amalgamations that raise eyebrows about anti-trust risks. Traditional media is still in the middle of its metamorphosis.
So what does this have to do with the redundancies? Amid all this, the hunger for credible information, and for news in particular, has grown. With the advent of social media first and AI next, the sector has completely changed.
True, younger generations are not getting their news from traditional media. If my undergraduate classes are a litmus test, many are not getting any news at all. For some, that justifies making the credibility of traditional news redundant. For me, that credibility is exactly the strategy, beyond cost saving, that must be maintained and fortified, so that we do not all become sheep, or curried goat.
The way forward is to use the traditions of newsmaking to change how news is produced and consumed, while keeping the standards, the gatekeeping and the credibility. And the culling of the procurement and production of local programmes? That's an entire story on its own. The answer must be to create more and better hybrid solutions, not mutants. Put talent at the centre of strategic development and create an influence culture around news and current affairs content.
Silence, noise and the pendulum
Making redundant the senior roles that oversee journalistic standards and local programming lowers the importance of media credibility and reputation in our evolving democratic journey. It leaves no heavy hitters to battle the scourge of illiberalism at an institutional level. This connects to my earlier research on cultures of silence: social environments where people, and in particular the media choose, are pressured, or incentivised not to speak out, report or discuss critical issues.
History tells us how that works. Comparisons may be odious, but sometimes they help to tell a story. In the 1970s and 1980s, Jamaica had a culture of confrontation with vociferous media voices in response to its political climate.
Ghana, at the same time, under a series of coups and militarisation, was forced into the Asante "language of conflict," which showed itself as a culture of silence. There, silence was a means of preservation but also a weapon: "the maintenance of polite silence and stillness represented the passive resistance of a people enduring and observing the occupation of imposition and oppression." Within a generation, Ghana's culture of silence became "a culture of excessive noise." As a Ghanaian communications professor told me, "We had one extreme – the culture of silence, and then it swung right to the other extreme."
Faced with the questions of liberalisation of media in the 1990s, Ghana kept its public service broadcaster, the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation to be part of a national conscience to counter future information threats.
In Jamaica, the pendulum swung the opposite way. Jamaica had privatised its public service broadcaster, the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation. Its television arm became the RJR's 'Super Supreme TV" and then "Television Jamaica". Eventually the Group began to grow, with new branded offerings.
The neoliberal wave washed over content production with implications first for what this new 'national station' would be. With it came new and evolving industry structures, different ways of working, changing sensibilities of media work, changing standards, movements of the media worker from employed to contracted.
As the systems changed within the ambit of globalisation, so did Jamaica's 'livity'. The strident twentieth-century culture of resistance and confrontation, undergirded by anticolonial sentiment, came to resemble the still silence of a "watch the ride" nation.
Its five characteristics became catatonic muteness, paralytic apathy, engineered helplessness, fear of defiance and fear of engaging (FWH, 2020). That stillness was the passive resistance of a majority enduring, observing and pushing through subsistence living.
In the new millennium we developed a progressive culture of silence of our own, and "equal rights" became "bumper to mi forehead." The neoliberal zeitgeist is a good place to start in explaining why.
Life moves forward along a timeline, but it also swings on a pendulum: a metronome of conscience. Jamaica's swing from its millennial culture of silence to a culture of excessive noise seems imminent.
When it comes, we will need credible, well-led newsrooms and professionals who understand the unique Jamaican media trajectory to turn that noise into informed public conversation.
Questions still unanswered
The RJR Group's losses reflect real challenges across the industry. Is it fair, then, to say that the commercial experiment for the media has failed?
That, in a Yankee sort of way, national conscience is becoming less and less the business of the media, and the institutional roles of the past have less and less bearing on the future, despite our unique cultures and histories? Has the Group been carried wide down an expedient, ahistorical path?
I've detailed the trajectory of this change and the liberalisation of television in Jamaica and Ghana elsewhere. In short, we are well into the post-liberalisation phase of media change, and we have a tradition-and-modernity problem as much as we have a growth and development problem.
We did not get here by magic. There were missteps along the way: in policy, in senior executive decisions and in the casualisation of the media workforce, all amid changing politics, economics, society, technology and global media transformation.
We have local cultures, media cultures among them, and local political realities that must be weighed against commercial realities. Have we weighed them adequately?
These senior roles provide the executive presence the media needs in its battle with illiberalism. Do we need to dump tradition to move forward? Does this move cut off RJR's nose to spite its face? Is it fit for our current national purpose? The questions remain unanswered. When we answer them, together, the way ahead may be clearer.
On a personal note: Moya and Milton et al, may your separation packages be fat and fulfilling, a contemporary show of value. Sadly, the values you passed on to scores of democracy keepers who came up under your watch have been treated as less important.
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