By Mabinty M. Kamara
I have a good friend that I have never met. And we’ve been friends for about three years now. I know this sounds strange but it’s true. He tells me he is a middle-aged man living with his small family on the edge of the Freetown Peninsula to the west of the urban area of the capital.
One month after taking over as Editor of Politico newspaper, I received a call from a man with a deep voice congratulating me and urging me to maintain the standards I inherited from the man I succeeded, Kemo Cham. I felt really good about that and thanked him for his compliments. It was a brief conversation and I knew from that moment that I was dealing with an avid reader of Politico – a man who cares about standards in the media. I also came from that conversation thinking that this mild tone could go the other way if at some point this friendly voice concludes that I was falling short of expected standards at Politico.
In the three years or so that I have been on this job and that may be true for other colleagues, I meet people at functions who take time to call my attention to certain reports in my newspaper or national issues they would like me to deal with but this friend of mine goes a bit beyond that. These days he makes fairly frequent calls to talk about the stories the country’s media in general cover, the quality of the coverage and the way social media has heavily impacted conventional media reporting on newspapers, TV and radio. Sometimes he is so detailed that I am sometimes tempted to calculate the many hours he spends in front of his TV and radio or reading newspapers and some social media applications to be able to demonstrate such a powerful grasp of the national conversation. In the Sierra Leone media, we are not used to dealing with such members of our audience.
In our last conversation he called to accuse the Sierra Leone media of ignoring the important issues confronting the country while busy crowding around political propaganda and spin that are mostly sourced from social media and giving prominence to what he called trivialities, backed by several pages of advertising.
This conversation took place in the middle of the production day in my newsroom so I couldn’t give a full response. This piece is an attempt to get to grips with his attack and then throw in a few ideas of mine in the hope that other colleagues would become interested and do the needful if not change the narratives. Admittedly, as journalists we have many a time been caught in the web of diversified possible media contents and those which we think gratify our readers and audiences forgetting other important issues that are of interest or affecting other members of the society.
The marginalized lot of society
The concept of public Interest Media according to Bob Eggington in his article titled journalism and public interest is rooted in the fact that public interest means anything that is relevant to the lives and well-being of all of us, to society and our communities. It concerns the “common good”, meaning matters that affect our health, livelihoods, quality of life, security, and our governance.
“The public interest does not mean what the public might find interesting. Broadly speaking, the difference here is between what is relevant to members of the public, as opposed to what might merely entertain, fascinate or titillate some of them,” it reads. As journalists, especially in this part of the world, we are easily tempted to mistake public interest for Uses and Gratification purposes which in essence should make our work really easy by just presenting the issues and leaving the rest for the public to choose that which gratifies them instead of framing and priming thinking it is that which gratifies them.
This takes me to a very sensitive topic that is often being ignored in the Sierra Leone media but remains a matter of serious concerns in our society. I am talking about the issue of LGBTQ+ people. Nobody wants to talk about the status and issues facing people with such sexual orientation yet they are our friends, brothers and sisters, work colleagues and so on.
I am not getting into the political correctness about whether they are diluting African culture with Western ones or whether their natural inclinations are acceptable to the rest of society.
From my editorial desk, I know the LGBTQ+ question is a reality that a fair, democratic and inclusive society which we say we are, must deal with. This is about socio-economic and political rights. These are issues that must be confronted in an open media space instead of joining the bandwagon to stigmatize and subject our own relatives to constant and unnecessary scrutiny.
Even their basic human rights are being treated with levity, sometimes by institutions of state - a plot in which we as journalists are found to be complicit by choosing not to make their stories part of the news agenda, in the belief that they do not gratify society. But is it all that society wants that we should strive to provide in our news coverage? What about the need for an inclusive and fair society? That’s a topic for another day.
Take the case of one young man in one of the new settlements in the eastern suburbs of Freetown. He was a reasonably successful guy in his own right - doing a brisk tea and sandwich business but he had cause to close stall and run away after word went round that he had failed in his attempt to make advances on another young man who turned out to be straight. It was obvious that the straight guy said a bit too much about those advances in the community. By and large, opinion over the incident was divided: many obviously were shocked and equally bemused at the revelation whilst some remarked that he should have been ignored and allowed to get on with his way of life.
The young man fled because he wouldn’t have been able to cope with the strange stares and likely scornful comments that would have been directed at him. This shows how large sections of our society still detest LGBTQ+ persons who unfortunately cannot have their stories told in the mainstream media let alone social media. In fact social media is more likely a platform where they could be subjected to bullying and other insensitive portrayals as was recently displayed after a social media influencer in Sierra Leone posted about the death of a boy suspected to be a member of the LGBTQ community. One of the comments reads: “It is better to die than to live a life of a gay.”
Last year Sierra Leone hosted a very big media conference here in Freetown on Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights, a conference that brought together participants from across some 41 countries in Africa to discuss sexual reproductive health rights and how they impact particularly women and girls across the continent. In that meeting, were LGBTQ+ people and there were discussions centred on their issues.
I happened to attend one of such open sessions but as the discussions got more sensitive, all non- LGBTQ+ members were excused; that was how I got out of that room.
But I can assure that in all the reports on that conference, not one factored the LGBTQ+ story despite the fact that as journalists we sat in that room with them and listened to their mind- blowing stories of how they manage to survive in their communities with their much frowned upon lifestyle. It was at the end of that conference that we heard of the Safe motherhood bill - the second coming of a once controversial bill that successfully went through parliament but never got to see the light of day after religious leaders and anti-abortionists prevailed on the former president not to give his assent to such an Act intended to legalize abortion in the country. This time even the name was carefully crafted to avoid any public outcry. But does that mean there are no abortions ongoing in Sierra Leone”? No!
In fact people are dying daily of post- abortion complications but like many other issues this happens to be the non-selected stories in our news coverage.
Whether my invisible reminds me or not, I am aware of the fact that there’s so much more we can do as media people to confront such issues and force them up the national agenda. Hanging in there snugly reporting politicians and the topics they chose to talk about is not bad but it represents only half of what we should be talking about.
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