Good and credible journalism cannot be propaganda. And journalists cannot be activists, no matter how noble the cause they feel for might be. Should credible journalism survive, the activists out there – in newsrooms and on TV screens – have to stop pretending that they are reporters working for the common good.
Ask a group of young journalists, be it in Nairobi, Kenya or in the German port city of Hamburg, known for its abundance of media houses, why they chose a profession that pays badly and puts them in the firing line, the majority will respond: That they want to make the world a better place.
Nothing wrong with that. We all want less armed conflict, tribal tension, hunger, populism or corruption. The decisive question is how one defines one’s own role in the media. Whether one lets oneself be driven by one’s political or religious convictions or by the search for truth, the urge to offer direction in a world that seems to be getting out of control in ever shorter intervals.
The pandemic has shown the importance of having an ethical compass as a journalist. And COVID-19 has underlined the importance of verifying news from different sources, of fact-checking information. It has shown how important it is to be a journalist who knows what he or she is talking about. You might be a good anchor, but can’t necessarily explain a flu in a comprehensive manner. Yet, one might be a good health journalist, whose salary is being funded by an American philanthropist, who sees journalism only as a tool for fighting Malaria and Ebola. But unless journalism is holistic, includes politics and business, even the best health journalism won’t make it in the long-run.
The reading and listening public might be unaware that journalists, who take their work serious, have to make choices all the time. They have to decide, day in and day out, which news to put on the front page, which lead to follow and how to comment a political development. Ideally, they ask themselves on a daily basis if they were just with the people they wrote about or if they followed first of all their convictions.
Journalists are no better human beings than the rest. But many of them have a bigger responsibility than others. Because their reports can influence opinions, elections, they can raise tensions and they can cause havoc. Sometimes their choices affect people’s lives in an existential way.
We are witnessing more and more journalism that only reacts to events, rather than reflects or initiates debates. More and more journalism tends to confirm the supposed opinions of its readers, viewers and listeners. There is a growing culture of impunity amongst media people, as the attitude prevails, that the nonsense they write today will probably be forgotten tomorrow.
Like that German reporter who covered the killing of murderers and innocent civilians in Rwanda, a year after the Genocide. As he drove slowly into the area in the lush hills near the Congolese border, against a stream of people fleeing in a cloud that smelt of fear and death, a man held his tiny baby through the open car window. The man begged the German reporter to save his child. The journalist couldn’t. And he wouldn’t. Not only was he moving towards the epicentre of the carnage, from which the child was to be protected. He also couldn’t because he had to report on those killings taking place. Through his reporting on German Public Radio, hundreds of thousands of peoples heard the story unfolding.
Certainly any journalist should ideally have compassion and empathy. And the German reporter still wonders today what became out of that baby, which must be in its mid-twenties by now, that is if it survived.
The German CEO of the Axel Springer Publishing house, Mathias Doepfner, a former journalist himself, recently accused many media people of being driven by their subjective preferences, rather than by the search for the truth. He said if journalism couldn’t be differentiated from activism anymore, it would demarcate the end of journalism.
What Doepfner describes can be adapted to anywhere in the world. We are witnessing more and more journalism that only reacts to events, rather than reflects or initiates debates. More and more journalism tends to confirm the supposed opinions of its readers, viewers and listeners. There is a growing culture of impunity amongst media people, as the attitude prevails, that the nonsense they write today will probably be forgotten tomorrow. You find these kinds of journalists in Europe, as well as in Africa, and there are surely many examples in Asia and South America as well. This culture not only undermines the credibility of journalism, it affects societies that need critical media as an outlet, where uneasy questions are asked and alternatives to the status quo discussed.
In Southern Africa, we witness developments that make one wonder if journalists have lost guidance. When writers who call themselves investigative journalists go through the rubbish bins of political leaders in South Africa, whom they dislike, and discover used condoms and champagne bottles, the question arises: So what?
Of course, there are those ones, so we hear from media entrepreneurs in the DRC or in Ethiopia, who chose journalism because they want to become famous and they have a pretty face. An Ethiopian publisher friend says he doesn’t hire from journalism schools in his country, but rather young people who have seen real life, like the young Ethiopian woman who was a lawyer before and who chose to be a reporter, as she discovered, that justice can not only be achieved in the courtroom.
In Southern Africa, we witness developments that make one wonder if journalists have lost guidance. When writers who call themselves investigative journalists go through the rubbish bins of political leaders in South Africa, whom they dislike, and discover used condoms and champagne bottles, the question arises: So what? Doesn’t this say more about the writer than the person who disposed those items in the rubbish bin?
Yet, there are impressive examples on the African continent, where despite repression and the convictions of people who run media houses, they stick to their journalistic beliefs of impartiality: The PREMIUM TIMES in Nigeria reported about the killings of peaceful anti-SARS protesters in a matter-of-fact way, without showing any signs of rage. And on the other side of the continent, the Swahili-website Jamii Forums in Tanzania covered the – rigged – elections of late October accurately and calmly, giving voice to the incumbent, as well as the opposition, reporting arrests of MPs and others in a responsible manner, no matter what the author might have felt himself.
Good and credible journalism cannot be propaganda. And journalists cannot be activists, no matter how noble the cause they feel for might be. Should credible journalism survive, the activists out there – in newsrooms and on TV screens – have to stop pretending that they are reporters working for the common good.
Christoph Plate is the director, Media Programme, Subsaharan Africa, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung.
