PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

 

GLOBACOM’S PHONE GIFTS TO THE MEDIA

kudugana@yahoo.com

 

           

The marketing strategy of Globacom Ltd, aka, Glo, the telecommunication giant, of giving free phones and free airtime to media houses recently touched off an internal debate at Media Trust Ltd, publishers of Daily Trust, a weekender, a Sunday and a Hausa newspaper. The debate has since spilled unto the pages of the stable’s daily.

           

I got to know about the internal debate when the editor of the daily, Mahmud Jega, asked me to return the handset he had given me as one of the free phones and lines from Glo. This was meant for reactions in text of readers to my column. I promptly returned the handset and the line.

           

A couple of days later, however, Jega returned the handset to me with information that after some intense internal debate, the company’s owners and management have decided to accept the gifts. Apparently they had concluded that the gifts were harmless and were, at any rate, unlikely to affect the editorial judgement of the management.

           

Because this decision appears to be in conflict with its well publicized policy of accepting no gifts from news sources, the management decided to publicize the gifts and its reasons for accepting them. It did this on page 2 of its April 28 edition.

           

The following Friday, i.e. May 2, Adamu Adamu, its Friday columnist and inimitable humorist, took the management head-on on the newspapers back page. A bribe by any other name, he said, is still a bribe and Glo’s gifts were nothing but bribes. Literary translating the Hausa wit about the difference between the thigh and the hind leg – ba cinya ba kafar baya – Adamu titled his article “Not thigh, it’s hind leg, stupid.”

           

Four days later, i.e. May 6, Ujudud Sheriff, another Trust columnist, supported Adamu. The company’s decision to accept Glo’s gifts was, he said, “an act of indiscretion.”

           

The Friday following Adamu’s article, i.e. on May 9, Aliu Akoshile, the company’s General Manager (Business and Strategy), replied Adamu on the back page. The company’s decision to accept Glo’s gifts was, he said, hinged on journalism’s code of ethics drawn up by Nigerian journalists themselves. The relevant section, he said, was Section 7, sub-section (i) which says a journalist should neither solicit nor accept bribe, gratification or patronage to suppress or publish information, and sub-section (ii) which says to demand payment for news is to undermine the principles of fairness, accuracy and objectivity.

           

Trust did not solicit for the gifts, he said in effect. The company chose to accept them, he said, only because it was firm in its resolve not to allow any gifts to influence its editorial judgement.

           

The Media Trust Ltd is not, of course, the only media to have received Glo’s gifts. It was certainly not the first for, long before it several newspapers including The Nation which I write for on the same Wednesdays, had been using Glo’s lines for feedback to its columnists. The Media Trust Ltd is, however, the only one I know that chose to announce the gifts and to openly debate their implications for the ethics of the profession.Such a debate can only be healthy for the journalism. It ought therefore to have since been joined by the rest of the media.

           

If the media exists to serve as society’s watchdog, it has to be as clear as possible in its mind about what is right and what is wrong for the good of society. Problem is, ethics, like life itself, is not all black or white. For most of the time ethics, like life, is the gray in between. This means media ethics are more like compasses to help one navigate one’s way through a sea full of the moral equivalent of sharks than laws cast in stone like the Ten Commandments of Moses.

           

This is why I think the Media Trust Ltd, like other newspapers before it, was not wrong to have accepted Glo’s gifts. The difference, of course, is that the company is the only one as far as I know to have declared the gifts and debated its merits on the pages of its newspapers. This is commendable. As the world’s largest news agency, Associated Press, says in its in-house code of conduct, the media “should report matters regarding itself or its personnel with the same vigor and candor as it would other institutions or individuals”.

           

Not that open declarations of gifts automatically eliminate any suspicions about them, as Akoshile suggested when he said bribes are always offered surreptitiously not in writing as Glo has done. These days gays and lesbians openly declare their sexuality in most so-called modern societies. Yet for the vast majority of people in those same societies, homosexuality is still regarded as wrong, if not an abominable evil.

           

Therefore, what is important beyond being open about anything of doubtful integrity is what one does to clear those doubts.

           

The other day I did mention in passing on these pages a one-page colonial document on the principles of public life which a very senior retired civil servant resident in Kaduna gave me. Among those principles are openness and honesty. The media, we all agree, are a public trust. Media professionals should therefore be open and honest in all their conduct.

           

This much is incontestable. What is not so incontestable is how to go about being open and honest since these values are open to more than one interpretation. That is to say, to some extent at least, ethics, like beauty, are in the eyes of the beholder.

           

All newspapers and other media have ethics, some formal, some informal. The king of all newspapers, the New York Times, for example, enjoins its staff to “be vigilant in avoiding any activity that might pose an actual or apparent conflict of interest and thus threaten the newspaper’s ethical standing.” It, however, instructive that it does not specify those activities.

           

The Times’ greatest rival, The Washington Post, is even more categorical about its ethics. “We accept no gifts from news sources,” it says. Another great American newspaper The Los Angeles Times, exhorts its staff to “politely refuse gifts from news sources or subjects or coverage, except those gifts of insignificant value.”

           

And so on, and so on. The important thing to note about all the ethnical rules however, is that none is couched in absolute terms and cannot be because in life nothing is absolute. For example, the Washington Post which says it accepts no gifts from news sources makes exceptions. “Exceptions to the no gift rule,” it says, “are few and obvious – invitations to meals for example.” The Post does not give additional examples but it is safe to say that the gift of a phone and a line for corporate use can be numbered among the other gifts acceptable to it, if only because meals can be more expensive than Glo’s phones and monthly free airtime.

           

No doubt there is a conflict of interest in accepting gifts from potential news sources but that of Glo is not of the magnitude of, say, an editor accepting to moonlight for a corporation as its closet public relations consultant or of a journalist serving as a consultant to a political party. Even more important are the steps a beneficiary of a gift takes to resolve any ensuing conflict of interest. If the steps taken would protect the public interest and would be seen to do so, then accepting a gift, depending on its nature and size, poses no threat to the public interest.

           

True, most corporations are prone to bribing their way out of trouble or to doing so in anticipation of future troubles. Offering their products to journalists may look like one of those tendencies but if that is all it takes to get journalists to turn a blind eye to their benefactor’s misdeeds, then their profession does not deserve to be called The Fourth Estate.