Cry The Beloved Journalism
After peeping and leering at the newspaper headlines on increase of fuel prices at a kiosk opposite total Melen in Yaounde last Monday, a visibly nervous sexagenarian nodded stiffly in disapproval.
With a half-baked mocking smile hanging on his lips, he exploded a prolonged hiss and screamed ‘‘wicked government”. Then the addicted habitués who usually gather to peep through headlines under the banner of Free Readers Association, FRA, joined the cursing galore. They constituted the people’s tribunal whose verdict was a free-for-all cursing of government which they say has decreed general mystery and hardship through the increase of fuel prices in the country. They did not only curse government.
They came down hard on newspapers that carried pro-establishment angles in their stories by justifying the increase of fuel prices and ignoring the monstrous consequences. When I pored over the headlines, I discovered that only few newspapers took the journalistic or the people’s angle of the story. In reporting the story, many newspapers behaved as if they were just a mere extension of the Ministry of Communication where government propaganda is a staple.
The journalistic angle that has to do with impact, oddity, the extraordinary and the conflict, was decently interred so that the government’s alchemy of frugal truths could emerge and enjoy absolute monopoly in the pages. I searched critically to see where a man would have bitten a dog in the words of John Bogart, and I did not see it in any of those stories. It was a “déjà vu and deja entendu” of propaganda clichés. Many of those newspapers which are everything else but professional, went beyond propaganda and activated a kind of pro-government activism on the issue.
Has journalism changed? Is it no longer that profession whose first obligation is to the truth and first loyalty to citizens? Is the press no longer the voice of the voiceless and by extension a defense lawyer for the oppressed against the oppressors in the court of public opinion? Does the press no longer play its Jeffersonian responsibility of the watch dog, whose responsibility is to call the authorities to account?
In the circumstances, one is forced to cry the beloved noble profession that is being taken to the murky waters of dishonor. It is sad that even some of the newspapers that used to be the undisputed flagship of print journalism, have sunk into the abysmal level of the so-called ‘’responsible journalism’’, which is just a polite euphemism for the churning out of government propaganda.
What ought to be truthful and objective reporting, has taken a pro-establishment hue in the bread and butter press. What the authorities usually refer to as the ‘’responsible press’’ are newspapers that have become propaganda pamphlets for time-serving schemers and soapbox opportunists of the regime. Publishers of such newspapers argue that, they are just looking for a means to survive. One may wonder if they can only survive by killing journalism which is the very essence of their professional existence.
Survival tactics have been projected as the reason why a majority of newspapers are pathetically bereaved of the logical solidity of intellectual discourse. They are hardly market places where one can read ideas from different political complexions. For, rational thought and genuine national discourse are no longer in their professional DNA.
Though different structures that have been setup to put a lease of control round the neck of the press, government has emerged as the self-imposed arbiter of journalistic taste. Thus, anything that does not put a smile on the faces of the authorities is no news to them. It is so infuriatingly out of place that even opinions columns in such newspapers are bywords of government propaganda. Vigorous literary and intellectual engagements are in a lamentable short supply in the pages. There is no reasonable measure of argumentation on topical issues of national import.
For, the ‘’responsible press’’ strives on sycophancy which is the greatest killer of genuine national discourse. Instead of being an antidote, the press has contributed so much in boasting the high level of bad governance in the country.
The alarm bell needs to be sounded because the malaise is deeper than meets the eye. Otherwise, what explains the fact that announcements and cheap propaganda from financial houses and the high and mighty are taking the place of lead stories in newspapers? Where is the interest of the reader in those stories that remain a quintessence of professional criminality? And that is what is usually passed off as “responsible journalism” in public circles. In such papers, the news is no longer news. News here is what has been paid for.
No doubt, the business aspect of newspapering cannot be undermined given that sales and advertising have continued to dwindle. But the evenness of any journalistic mind will ensure that professionalism and business interest strike a balance. If one of them must rise above the other, then it must be professionalism over business and not vice versa. For, it is professionalism that makes newspapering a business and not the other way round. Cry the beloved journalism!
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