He was not, we have been assured by the information minister, Mr Daryl Vaz, being a stalking horse for Government and, we take it, the governing Jamaica Labour Party. The administration, Mr Vaz says, has no intention of licensing journalists.
We would, of course, have preferred a more robust rejection of Mr Peralto's threat but, for now, take the Government at its word.
We, nonetheless, remain vigilant, understanding, as we do, the circumstances that tend to trigger sabre-rattling like Tarn Peralto's.
He is part of an administration that came to office with a promise to expand the operating space for the free press, on which it has taken preliminary action. Indeed, the House committee of which Mr Peralto is a member has been reviewing a report of a group, led by Justice Hugh Small and appointed by Mr Golding, that made recommendations for modernising Jamaica's defamation laws.
The environment, however, has changed radically in the 27 months the Government has been in office. Like all governments, this administration has had to face the scrutiny of the press with a glare that is, perforce, more intense than when it was in Opposition. Jamaica finds itself in a deep economic crisis and the Government's management has been called into question.
Understandably, people like Mr Peralto - and we dare say many others in the ruling party and Government - don't like it too much. They would prefer curbs and restrictions on the way the press does its job, but no one wants to frame their intent in such stark terms.
Mr Peralto, however, like a spectre from the ideological graveyard, harked back to a period of the 1970s when people talked about a New World Information Order and UNESCO was appropriated by the would-be information and ideas apparatchik in an attempt to corral thought. The big suggestion of the day was for the licensing of journalists.
Standards of registration
Said Mr Peralto: "There have to be standards of registration and that's where you need to get to. I believe it is going to come. I promise you that."
We suppose Mr Peralto and his ilk have not tested the implication of his suggestion, or followed it to its logical conclusion, which, really, is about the dismantling of a critical plank of democracy.
The free press and the right to be journalists are not notions contrived by politicians and governments to be regulated by bureaucrats; they rest in Section 22 of the Jamaican Constitution, which is to be incorporated into the new Charter of Rights, that guarantees to Jamaican citizens "freedom of expression and the freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart ideas and information without interference".
Understood another way, the free press, with its use of technology that gives it wider reach, merely leverages the individual's right to freedom of expression. Licensing journalists, therefore, is the proverbial thin end of the wedge.
The next step would be the requirement of official approval to write paper-based letters or to send emails. Or, Mr Peralto may deem democracy too burdensome.
This newspaper has a robust code of ethics which, with the already overstringent defamation laws, provides sufficient protection.
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