“There can be no democracy without the functioning free press. In the absence of democracy people have no right to freedom, of any sort. The result is tyranny and autocracy, and these are anathema to life anywhere, in this age.”
– Andy Johnson, April 2022

Andy Johnson is currently a contributor, columnist and editorial writer with the Trinidad Express newspapers and has returned to morning television on WESN TV.

He returned to the Express seven years ago and has been hosting at WESN for a year.
Andy’s history in local media has been diverse. He previously served between 2003 and 2010 as the host of the TV6 morning edition.

For five years, 2010-2015, he served as CEO of the Government Information Services of Trinidad and Tobago, as Government Spokesman and Press and Media Adviser to the Prime Minister and members of her Cabinet.

In 1987, he was part of the founding membership of MATT and was appointed the first president of MATT and serving in that capacity twice.

He has been a long standing member of the Caribbean Association of Media Workers, now the Association of Caribbean Media Workers and has, since 2014 been a member of the International Press Institute.

Andy marks his fiftieth anniversary as a journalist and reporter this year, beginning with his first salary as a reporter writing for Moko., a political weekly run by Dr James Millette, a well regarded local historian who briefly led the United National Independence Party.

The other Andy Johnson, found in Trinidad All Stars in 2011. Photo by Mark Lyndersay.

He went quickly from there to the Bomb and then began doing freelance work for the Trinidad Guardian and Evening News.

By 1974, he was Airport Bureau reporter for those publications and in 1976, he migrated to Toronto in 1976, where he worked in Black and West Indian media, including the multicultural station CHIN FM, Contrast and Islander, weekly papers serving those communities.

He began hosting television with the programme Black Focus for a diaspora NGO.

Andy furthered his education at York University, taking courses in the Humanities and Social Sciences with a focus on Latin American and Caribbean studies.

On his return to Trinidad and Tobago in 1983, he found himself among the first journalists to break the story of the collapse of the People’s Revolutionary Government in Grenada.

He continued high-level coverage of regional developments from the independence of St Kitts to the last in-person summit of Heads of the Caricom region in 2020, reporting along the way on the ouster of Jean Bertrand Aristide in 2004 and the Haiti earthquake of 2010.

In 1990, he anchored the attempted coup by the Muslimeen.

He went on to become Head of News and Current Affairs at Trinidad Broadcasting Company, Editor of the Trinidad Guardian, Editor of The Wire, and Head of News at Power 102.1FM.