What distresses me most about the Jack Warner-Lasana Liburd affair is the utter failure of the journalism community and indeed the media industry as a whole to respond vigorously to the challenge thrown at them by the rampaging football czar.
Liburd is only the point man on this issue. If his colleagues, his fellow journalists don't say to Warner "STOP", if the publishing and broadcasting houses don't tell him he can't choose for them who is to cover this or that football match or tournament, they will have abandoned their roles as communicators, reporters, educators.
I don't propose to get involved with Warner's scandalous reply to Liburd's disclosures of his selfish handling of the air and ground tickets to the Leipzig contest.
One only has to read it or listen to it to appreciate that Liburd's well-crafted, investigative, informative approach to the affair has thrown Warner off balance to the point where he, in my view, slandered Liburd, made accusations against the reporter that could be easily refuted, exposed his personality as that of a dictator who believes he speaks no evil and who can do no wrong.
The response, or lack of, from media practitioners is interesting. More than a week has passed and the Media Association, so voluble on matters involving other issues, has remained steadfastly silent.
The publishers and broadcasters, apparently too busy working on a code of ethics for the industry, have said nothing as though it is of no interest or importance to their well-being.
Yet an important principle is involved here. Freedom of the Press is enshrined in the Constitution of Trinidad and Tobago. No other Caribbean territory has attempted to single "the press" out from their general acceptance that freedom of expression is a constitutional fortress to be defended without fear or without favour.
The media response is instant when these freedoms are attacked in the political arena. Journalists in this country have marched the streets of Port of Spain to protest what they consider political interference.
I remember some years ago abandoning my treasured objectivity to march the streets of Port of Spain when the Media Association rightly felt the principle was being endangered by the government in power. And I remember seeing among the marchers Joan Yuille-Williams, today a Cabinet Minister, and trade unionist Errol McLeod.
The reaction in the media this time round seems to be the issue is at best of marginal importance. It is only about football and if the Express wishes to send Liburd to Leipzig, all they have to do is buy the tickets to this sporting affair.
Liburd's name became a familiar one all through last year and the year before when his reports of soccer matches in England involving Trinidad players were published in the Express.
Without his coverage, the soccer fever that hit Trinidad and Tobago when the time came for the World Cup matches to be played would not have been as intense. Even the chutney propagandists are today seeking a last-minute invasion of the limelight.
So thanks to these reports, and there were others in competitive sectors of the media, by the time the qualifiers began, these young men-with the exception of Yorke and Latapy, who were our star performances for a decade-had become familiar figures.
No other football writer in this country has covered his beat with Liburd's intensity, his accuracy and his determination to spread himself across the United Kingdom landscape from one football ground to the other. We knew who these young men flying the Trinidad and Tobago flag in Latin America, in Asia were largely because Liburd's reporting had brought them home and within our purview.
And now the time for him and his newspaper to transmit to readers in Trinidad and Tobago the play of the national team at the World Cup, Warner's heavy hand comes crashing down.
Mr Warner's placemen, themselves journalists in their own right, seemed to have had no qualms delivering to Liburd letters informing their one-time colleague he would not be allowed in the press box or in the dressing rooms of the players in Leipzig, that he would not be allowed to interview the players at any time. Indeed the chances were he would not be allowed an airline ticket from Piarco to Leipzig.
If Mr Warner and his bureaucrats are allowed to get away with this stroke of infamy, if it is so easily possible to keep a reporter out of the media box by refusing him accreditation because you don't like what he writes, if Liburd's fellow sports writers, other journalists and his bosses and their associates at management level allow Warner to get away with this, they would have done irreparable harm to journalism in this country.