Last week in Kingston, James Vermillion, the executive vice-president of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, a Washington-based organisation that promotes democracy, spoke with passion of the 1970s' work of the Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who blew the lid off the Watergate scandal, leading to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Dr Vermillion was illustrating how an independent and motivated press can contribute to the protection and maintenance of democracy and was using the Watergate experience to challenge the Jamaican media to a creative role in the promotion of integrity in public life in Jamaica. His essential message: cover the issue boldly.

significant effectiveness

We, of course, agree. It is, indeed, a role that the Jamaican press already plays with significant effectiveness, but in trying circumstances - which may just be becoming more difficult. In recent years, a number of court awards in defamation cases against the press can have nothing but a chilling effect on the capacity of reporters to search for the truth and to place the spotlight on people who hold public office or enjoy positions of public trust. Indeed, only a few media houses in the English-speaking Caribbean could survive the potentially ruinous effect of such awards.

Part of the problem, we feel, is that in Jamaica, like the rest of the English-speaking Caribbean, there is ambivalence towards the press. People appreciate its capacity, and actual effort, in defending and protecting the society's rights and freedoms, but there is not a full embrace of the philosophy of the press's role in the Jeffersonian sense. There is this notion that it is good, but better kept at bay and brought out in times of crises. It is not surprising, therefore, that many thinkers, and not necessarily persons connected to the media, detect a certain timidity in the Jamaican and Caribbean judiciary in their interpretations of defamation. The weight, particularly in rulings involving jurors, is stacked against the press.

As Thomas Jefferson understood centuries ago, there was an unwritten compact between the press and the society which it serves: The media's capacity for reach and application placed them in a superb position to act as that critical watchdog, which we claim to want. It is no accident, therefore, that the United States Constitution specifically insists upon freedom of the press, or that in Sullivan v New York Times, the Supreme Court raised the bar for public officials to succeed in defamation actions.

greater protection

Jamaica, it appears, is not ready to give full embrace to the Jeffersonian ideal. Nonetheless, there is a basis for an advance that will provide greater protection to the media, individual freedoms and, ultimately, Jamaica's democracy. A committee, established by Prime Minister Golding and headed by Justice Hugh Small, established a framework for defamation reform. Mr Golding should move with dispatch to have that report shaped into workable legislation.

The real danger of chilling court awards is the delivery of a press that we really do not want.