Mid-Ocean News

Dictators consider the media in their countries as either a tool or a thorn in their sides. Throughout history, repressive leaders have taken control of the media to shut down opposition and the forum they provide for public discussion. The state of a country's media is usually representative of the degree of freedom enjoyed in that country. Bermuda has a daily newspaper, a twice-weekly and a weekly newspaper, all publicly owned. It has three TV channels attached to the US networks, and a number of locally operated channels pump out music videos and travelogues. Four or five radio stations are on the air. More than a dozen magazines are published routinely, year round. A handful of Bermuda-centric books appear every year.

Bermuda took another step down the road from well-respected, relatively-clean, model democracy to internationally-ridiculed, corruption-ridden, banana republic when the office of Bermuda's Auditor General, Larry Dennis, was raided by police for the second time in five months on November 17, 2007.

Bermuda, which portrays itself to the world as the ‘clean' face of offshore finance, much to the disdain of rival jurisdictions in the Caribbean, has been rocked by evidence of corruption involving several senior politicians, including Premier Ewart Brown. The evidence was contained in a two-and-half-years-old police report into an $8 million corruption scandal at Bermuda Housing Corporation — a government-funded quango set up to build affordable housing — that was leaked to the local Mid-Ocean News newspaper, which had first exposed the scam in 2002.