PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

ThisDay and the Commoditisation of the Press

kudugana@yahoo.com

Last Friday, April 28, ThisDay responded to widespread criticisms of its decision to carry a wrap-around advert in support of the Third Term agenda with a full-page self-advert. The advert, addressed to its readers, was a robust defense of its position. “Since the publication of our wrap-around advertisement on Thursday, April 20, 2006 placed by supporters of tenure elongation for President Obasanjo,” ThisDay said, “there has been a lot of reactions from readers and the general public. “We continue to welcome all views and reactions as we engage our esteemed readers in making ThisDay a better newspaper. “However, a few local commentators and columnists with limited understanding of current trends in newspaper publishing have continued to serve their readers with half-truths, founded on ignorance and lack of understanding of the issues… “For columnists who do not know, whose journalistic ideas are passé, wrap-around advertisement is not new to Nigeria and the print media the world over. It is an effective marketing tool used by the best and brightest newspapers and magazine the world over to offer creative solutions to marketing challenges.” To prove its point ThisDay displayed a wrap-around advert from a New York property developer, carried by the International Herald Tribune on January 27, 2006 and another one from Ritz, a leading global hospitality company, carried by Newsweek International on March 27, 2006. ThisDay’s wrap-around advert was the subject of my column last week. In it, I argued that publishing the advert was unprofessional and unethical. “The wrap-around political advert that ThisDay carried on Thursday April 20, and which the Sunday Vanguard carried last Sunday, was,” I said, “like the Atkins’ episode repeating itself – only this time worse; Atkins may have been a faceless coward, but at least someone signed his advertisement. Not only did no one sign the advert, it carried the stamp of authority of both newspapers. This was simply unacceptable professionally and ethically.” For those who may not have read my article last week, Dr. Keith Atkins was a, if not the, leading advocate of the extension of military president General Ibrahim Babangida’s transition programme. Early 1992 he published a full page advert in almost all the national newspapers urging Babangida to extend his transition from 1993 to 1997. It was in consideration of Dr. Atkins’ ignoble role that I titled my article last week as “ThisDay, the neo-Atkinists and the Third Term agenda.” Apparently my good friend, Nduka Obaigbena, ThisDay’s publisher, and his editors took exception to the characterization of their decision as unprofessional and unethical. Their response goes to the heart of both the theory and practice of journalism as a profession. It therefore deserves a close examination. ThisDay says those of us who criticized its wrap-around advert are out of date, at least professionally. Its only proof was that even well-regarded global publications like International Herald Tribune and Newsweek International do it. To begin with, ThisDay’s example was a misleading comparison; the IHT and Newsweek wrap-around adverts were not anonymous. The advertisers were well known names in their areas of business. In sharp contrast, ThisDay’s wrap-around was anonymous. To date no one has owned up to paying for it nor has ThisDay itself revealed the advertiser’s identity. On the contrary everyone, including ThisDay, has tried to disown the advert. Transcorp, President Obasanjo’s conglomerate godson and the leading suspect, has since vehemently denied any links with the advert. ThisDay itself, through my brother, Olusegun Adeniyi, one of its editors and divisional directors, has said that in carrying the advert it should perhaps have entered a caveat warning the reader that he read it at his own risk! However, even if ThisDay’s wrap-around was not anonymous, I still think the newspaper was wrong professionally and ethically to have carried it. The fact that others do it abroad does not necessarily make it right. I cannot presume to lecture Obaigbena and his editors on how to run a successful newspaper. As I said last week I tried running a private newsmagazine, Citizen, sixteen years ago and failed after only four years on the streets. Obaigbena too once tried publishing a business newsmagazine, ThisWeek, and failed. The difference was that he was undeterred. He dusted himself up and tried again, this time with ThisDay which even his worst enemies must admit is one of the best newspapers in the country. The newspaper company itself, I suspect, may not have been profitable and its assets and liabilities may not have been in balance, but at least its publisher and editors, if not its foot soldiers, have done well for themselves and the newspaper has hardly missed a beat since it started over 11 years ago. However, even though I cannot presume to lecture Obaigbena and his editors on how to run a successful newspaper, I am sure they know that the real issue at the heart of the concept of wrap-around adverts is not about what is trendy. Neither is it about offering “creative solutions to marketing challenges.” Rather it is about the subordination of the purpose of journalism to the profit motive and to other less than wholesome considerations. As Obaigbena and Company know very well, this idea of wrap-around adverts is a very recent phenomenon in the history of even modern-day journalism. It has arisen because the success of newspapers abroad, under relentless concentration of their ownership especially by Big Business, has become measured more by their earnings than by the quality of their journalism. This development can only portend ill for society. As Joseph Pulitzer, one of America’s most notable newspaper publishers and the founder of the Pulitzer prize, Journalism’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, said more than a century ago, “Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together… A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself.” As the American press became more cynical, mercenary and demagogic with time, is it any surprise that the American people have become more cynical, mercenary and demagogic about its politics and business? Is it any surprise that fewer and fewer American citizens are participating in the country’s politics as poll after poll have shown? More specifically, is it any surprise that its politicians thought nothing of lying their way – lying about non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent link to Al-Qaida - into dragging Americans, kicking and screaming, into a war with Iraq that may yet prove more disastrous for their country than Vietnam? If the politicians thought nothing of lying their way into such a disastrous war was it not because they knew they could rely on the media owned by their Big Business cronies and partners to act as their lapdogs instead of as society’s watchdog? The purpose of journalism is not merely reporting or writing news. Its purpose is to serve the public trust and journalists cannot serve the public trust properly if they subordinate quality journalism to the profit or any similar motive. And no matter how you look at it wrap-around adverts are a consequence of subordinating quality journalism to the profit motive. Once upon a-not-too-distant-time, the front cover of any newspaper or newsmagazine was meant for the headlines of its stories and nothing more. Advertisements may bring in more money than the cover price of a newspaper or a newsmagazine, but the newspaper cover was not the place for shouting an advert at the reader.

Building a large enough faithful readership to attract sufficient adverts that would make a publication profitable takes a lot of resources in time, capital and men or women. It also takes motherluck. The easiest way for a newspaper to loose those readers in the long run is for it to mix its adverts with its editorial content. As one, Annie Gerton, said in her 2003 book Press Here!: Managing the media for free publicity, “The closer the advertising and editorial, the less credible the editorial and the less appeal it has to the discerning reader – your customer.” The chaps at ThisDay may think those of us who say that adverts should never take the front page away from news are out of date, but they know, or at least should know, that while fashions come and go, only adherence to the basic principles of an institution can keep it alive and well. And, I repeat, it is a basic principle of journalism that adverts do not take priority over news and certainly you do not camouflage views as news, which is what wrap-around adverts do. Camouflaging views as news can only create conflicts of interests. Such conflicts are journalism’s greatest enemy, as a profession that searches for and publishes the truth as much as it can establish such truths. As the Washington Post which ThisDay quoted approvingly in its self-advert, said in its in-house Code of Conduct for its journalists, “In the pursuit of truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such course is necessary for the public good.” Post may not have always practiced what it preached as we could see from ThisDay’s example of Newsweek International which Post owns, but the fact that it says it is prepared to make material sacrifices in the pursuit of truth is an acknowledgement of the fact that money, especially in journalism, should not be everything. And while we are at it, we may as well address another innovation at ThisDay which can only create conflicts of interests. This is its innovation of organising lavish ceremonies at which it doles out awards to personalities and institutions. These awards are even worse than wrap-around adverts as a practice that can only undermine the integrity of Nigerian journalism. Newspapers do endorse or reject candidates for political office. They also nominate men or women or institutions as the most newsworthy in a year, for good or bad. Such endorsements/rejections and nominations have, however, never been regarded universally as journalism’s best practice. Certainly no newspaper has ever organised ceremonies to give out such awards, not especially in the elaborate and lavish manner in which ThisDay has gone about it in recent years. As one Professor Layi Erinosho of Ogun State University said in a letter to the editor in The Comet of April 11, newspapers’ “integrity could easily be compromised once they get in into the business of dishing out honorific awards to the so-called reputable organisations and eminent personalities.” A newspaper or a newsmagazine is not just any commodity like oil, groundnut, silver, or cassava. Newspapers and newsmagazine are sacred trusts. They should therefore never be commoditisized as if their primary role in society is to make as much money as possible for its owners and editors rather than to serve as society’s watchdog.