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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA Dragging Journalism on the Floor
The occasion was the coronation of the Olowu of Owu in Abeokuta, Ogun State, nearly three years ago. As his ancestral home, President Olusegun Obasanjo was among those present at the coronation. So also was Oluremi Oyo, his spokesperson.
The way she told it in a widely circulated rejoinder to a news item about the occasion in a Lagos evening newspaper, as the ceremony proceeded she noticed that the myriads of photographers covering the event had become rowdy and unruly, making it difficult, if not impossible, for guests to have a chance to see the ceremony.
”Duty then dictated that I get up to help with the organisation”, she said in the rejoinder entitled “Dragged on the floor by Journalism” (Thisday, October 12, 2005). So, along with another official of the Ogun State Government, she said, she tried to bring order to the chaos. At first the photographers were uncooperative. Eventually, reason prevailed and they agreed to be stay in one corner of the venue and then move out one manageable group after another to take their photographs.
In the process of bringing order to the chaos, Mrs. Oyo said, she was inadvertently pushed. “No being Hercules of the Greek mythology, and being a normal human being,” she said, “I fell. I was helped up by two gentlemen and a brilliant opportunistic colleague took the picture”.
The following day the Lagos based PM News ran a front page picture story suggesting she was brutalized by the police. At first she decided to ignore the story but when her phone would not stop ringing with calls from concerned friends, she decided to call the publisher, Mr. Bayo Onanuga, and ask for a correction.
Onanuga, she said, apologized and promised a correction the following Monday. “Regretably, Monday morning came and not only did TheNews magazine, the sister publication of PM News carry the same picture-story,” said Mrs. Oyo, “to my chagrin, the lie had travelled further.” Hence her decision to write her rejoinder and circulate it as widely as possible.
Last week for the third time in under three years, Mrs. Oyo was once again, “dragged on the floor”, this time by some faceless people who obviously do not wish her well. The second time was in February when some malicious people hacked into the email address of the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), where she had moved to as managing director, and sent out a story which claimed she said the Federal Court of Appeal has returned a verdict dismissing President Umaru Yarádua’s election. Luckily for her none of NAN’s subscribers ran the story. Someone from Punch had called to cross-check and that alerted NAN in time to denounce the story before anyone could publish it.
She was not so lucky the second time last week. This time Channels, a Lagos based television station, ran the story, attributing it to Agence France Press (AFP), the French news agency, which in turn had attributed the story to NAN.
The news this time was that the president had decided to resign due to ill health after he would have completed an impending cabinet reshuffle.
From the two attempts to sneak false stories about the president to the world through NAN, it seems to me that some people want Mrs. Oyo out of her job. This would not surprise anyone who is familiar with the changes that she has tried to make in the organisation since she became its boss last year. Naturally these changes have not gone down well with some senior staff that have suffered demotion or have had to resign. It has also not gone down well with some former very senior staff whose conduct has been under investigation by the ICPC at the invitation of Mrs. Oyo following the financial and administrative rot she was said to have discovered when she took over.
Last week’s attempt to undermine Mrs. Oyo’s management may yet succeed because of the gravity of the story. If it does, it would be most unfair to the NAN boss because the issue at stake here is not about the organiztion's professionalism and integrity. Neither is it about her competence and integrity.
Obviously she and her organisation have been lax in securing its email address especially considering that this month’s attempt to hack into it was not the first. Of course hackers have been known to infiltrate into even the most secure addresses like those of banks and even that of the American CIA, possibly the most secure secret service in the world.
With NAN, however, it seemed all too easy. Even then to sack Mrs. Oyo because of the story would not only be unfair to her, it would be most unfortunate because such an action would not have addressed the main issue at stake which is that of the professionalism and the integrity of our journalism itself.
Over twenty five years ago, Sonala Olumhense, one of the country’s finest and longest running columnists, wrote in The Guardian of July 4, 1983, about journalism being chained by journalists. This was on the very day the newspaper went daily.
The background was the debate between me and Ray Ekpu about who were the greater villains between journalists and their proprietors in the attempts during that period to muzzle press freedom and, with it, free speech. Ekpu said it was proprietors and I said it was journalists themselves. Olumhense seemed to have agreed with me.
"When we lose our voice and have to calm down and truly exercise reason", he said, "we are able to admit the truth: that the most nauseating scourge of journalism in the country is the journalist himself."
His proof was difficult to assail – the prevalence of journalists who wrote or killed stories for money or such similar considerations, journalists who were closet paid consultants for individuals, political parties and other organisations, and journalists who sacrificed their ethics for tribe or religion, the lot.
Over twenty five years after Olumhense made these remarks, it seems things have gotten worse not better. Even more worrying, however, is that it seems to me journalists have become even more loath to engage in any serious introspection. This is obvious from the media response to government invasion of Channels’ office in Abuja and its headquarters in Lagos and the initial closing down of its station and the suspension of its license.
In general, the media has been highly critical – and rightly so – of government’s reaction, or more accurately, over-reaction to the story. However, you will have to dig a lot deeper to find any serious criticism of Channels for running the story in the first place.
The TV station ran the story because it presumed that its source, the AFP, was unimpeachable. That breached of one of journalism’s most basic tenets – never trust any source blindly. If Channels had bothered to check the story, it would have found that AFP was not listed among those organisations that received the malicious story. The question is since the hackers did not send the story to AFP, where and how did it get the news?
The first time NAN knew that some mischief was afoot using it as a camouflage was when a client from Abidjan that was not even a media house, emailed back to the agency to confirm the authenticity of its "flash news". NAN quickly wrote back to deny authorship of the story. By then Channels had started running it without cross-checking with NAN or with anyone else. According to Mrs. Oyo who was away in China at the time, her lieutenants quickly got on to Channels and told them to yank it off. The station refused, she said.
When I spoke with its boss, John Momoh, he said it was not true that his station refused to yank off the story. Far from refusing to do so, he said, it broadcast a retraction. I did not watch Channels at the time of the incident. However, those who did said it carried the story more than once before it finally stopped it. In any case, the damage had already been done by the time it stopped.
Second, the so-called newsflash was in illiterate English, with misspellings and all. It was uncharitable to believe such illiteracy could emanate from NAN given its record so far. Third, the item was patently illogical. It did not make sense to say that the president would reshuffle his cabinet on the eve of his departure .
In the light of all this it is only reasonable to expect the media to be at least as critical of Channels in running the story as it has been of the government for its over-reaction. When Mrs. Oyo was first dragged on the floor by journalism nearly three years ago, she spoke about the need “for a personal examination of the state of the profession by all of us who subscribe to the nobility of journalism.” At that time, I suspect, little would she have imagined that some journalists would have allowed themselves to be used by some faceless mischief makers to drag an important institution as NAN on the floor in a race to be first with the news.
Free speech is not, or at least should not, be contingent upon responsible behaviour and professionalism on the part of journalists. But unless we constantly re-examine ourselves and behave responsibly as journalists – meaning unless we subject our selves to at least as much criticism as we subject others to – few people will take us seriously when we pontificate about being society's watchdog.
Having said all this, however, it must be pointed out that the root of all this mischief, some of them out rightly malicious, is the cult of secrecy that the presidency has erected around itself especially on the issue of the president's ill-health. The longer he refuses to level with Nigerians about the state of his health the more malicious will rumours of his ill-health get and the wider and deeper they will spread.
As America’s Justice Louis D. Brandeis reportedly once remarked, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants”. |