By Umaru Fofana
If you are an editor of a newspaper or in a radio or TV newsroom in Sierra Leone I wonder how long ago it was that a journalist called requesting you to assign a reporter to cover an event he was helping organise. Not their alumni association, not a purely charity organisation they were volunteering services to, and not a campaign to save a child or some other less-privileged. I suppose not long ago. These days many of us pretend to be journalists but spend more of our time being busy looking to do some public relations work for some public official or business enterprise using our known profession as a fig leaf.
Imagine what it would be like if journalists decided to compromise their cardinal principles of holding people to account and chose instead to become pliable characters defending or glossing over what is wrong and deriding what is good. While you give that a mull, I can safely tell you that if journalists did that the firewall that the media should build around society, not least the masses, would collapse and the hapless public would be incinerated by the rich and powerful including those in whose hands they have entrusted themselves. Consequently, the journalists – a very small fraction of the civil society compared to the rest of the population – would become rich and powerful at the expense of those they are supposed to safeguard.
How? Well those in power or positions of trust would give the journalists plenty of money – mostly if not entirely stolen from the state’s coffers – to keep their mouths shut and turn a blind eye to the abuse of power and stealing of resources that should otherwise go towards ameliorating the lives of the people. The leaders would continue to favour one set of people instead of treating them all equally.
The mining companies and other corporate entities would do the same in cahoots with the elected officials and pillage the communities. The nongovernmental organisations who claim to be here to improve the lives of the people would get rich while the masses get further impoverished. Big time criminals including drug traffickers would connive at wrong doing with the journalists and the society would rot and collapse. So this is why journalists should exist – and be conscionable.
In Sierra Leone however there is a new and undesirable phenomenon creeping into the journalism profession. No, I am not talking about politicians setting up or sponsoring newspapers or radio stations to mind them off their cardinal responsibility and instead become their ventriloquists instead of the masses’. No, I am not talking about journalists eulogising those with power to abuse and state resources to steal and instead paying attention to those whose actions hardly if at all directly hamper the growth of our society.
Of recent I have observed that many journalists clamour to do public relations for one NGO or another, or for one government ministry, department or agency or another. They follow them to events and write highly skewed pieces and churn them out for media houses to publish. They meet heads of Parastatals and interview them in very slanted ways without a modicum of challenge, write around such interviews and syndicate them across the media landscape. Heads or officials of foreign NGOs visit the country and some journalists keep harassing their fellow journalists for coverage.
And because of the hectic nature of the media landscape enmeshed in poverty and cut-throat journalism, many editors easily fall prey by publishing such materials if only to fill up space – without regard to the merit of the content of what is being published. The journalists cum public relations people soon drift away to pay more attention to the PR which seems more rewarding to them, yet failing to leave the profession for those who are interested in it. The line then becomes very thin and blurred and subsumes public service into serving corporate or public officials.
When I worked at the Sierra Leone News Agency at the turn of the millennium there were reporters attached to government ministries and departments. I remember always being at odds with some of them who saw themselves as public relations officers in these offices. They had actually been sent there as reporters but soon they started reacting to issues genuinely covered by the independent media, and doing damage control.
The same thing happened when, during the last two elections (2007 and 2012), certain journalists who were assigned by their media outlets to cover the various candidates ended up serving as public relations officers for such candidates ignoring the people’s interest. So much so that when the candidate they were assigned to won, they clung on with some of them appointed by the new president. I bet if they had reported fairly, objectively and consciously they would almost certainly not have been given their new positions. This is called betrayal of trust.
More challenging also is the fact that some of these organisations and even public offices sometimes – in fact more often than not – recruit or appoint people to handle their public relations who have had no previous media or PR experience be it academically or by practice. They end up falling back on the so-called journalists to coordinate their colleagues for them. An often this is done in dribs and drabs and in a disjointed way. It does not serve the institution and it betrays the world’s best profession.
(C) Politico 11/02/15
