For two days, beginning Monday December 15, the Conference Centre of the University of Ibadan played host to a gathering of reporters, media scholars and senior journalists for a training workshop on fair and balanced reporting of elections. The workshop was organized by an association of Media scholars, the Media Scholars Network, in conjunction with the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). This reporter was one of a team of nine media scholars and senior journalists, one of them from Ghana, who served as resource persons.
As far as workshops go, this was as stimulating and educating as any. It opened, as is usual with occasions like this, with a welcome address by the convener, Professor Ayo Olukotun, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences of Lead City University, Ibadan, and himself a prize winning columnist with PUNCH. Mr Chukwuemeka Ugboaja, the Chief Publicity Officer of INEC, spoke on behalf of his Chairman, Professor Attahiru Jega.
The first paper was delivered by the Ghanaian senior journalist and President of the Ghana Association of Writers, and also a member of the country’s Media Commission, Mr Kwasi Gyan-Apeteng. His paper gave an international perspective on the theme of the workshop. His was followed by a very thought provoking paper from Professor Lai Oso, Dean of the School of Communication, Lagos State University (LASU). Oso spoke on the subject of objectivity in reporting. The day’s session ended with my paper which was about a columnist’s perspective on fair and balanced reporting.
(There was to have been a fourth paper on the malignant and widepread influence of the almighty “brown envelop” (the Nigerian euphemism for cash for news) syndrome on journalism by Professor Wale Olaitan, a former Vice-Chancellor of the Ogun State Olabisi Onabanjo University and a member of the Editorial Board of Tribune, but he was unavoidably absent. Instead his paper was moved to the following day.)
Tuesday started with Olaitan’s paper delivered on his behalf by Dr Remi Aiyede, a senior lecturer of Political Science, University of Ibadan. This was followed by another paper from Lanre Idowu, Editor-in-Chief and Chief Executive Officer of Diamond Publications, publishers of Media Review, a media watchdog, and organizers of the Diamond Awards for excellence in Journalism. The third, fourth and fifth papers were delivered in that order by Mr Dapo Olorunyomi, a veteran of The News magazine and now boss of Premium Times, probably the country’s premier online newspaper, Mr Yomi Olayinka, the boss of the Broadcasting Organization of Oyo State (BCOS), and Mrs Tayo Agunbiade, an alumnus of The Guardian, former chairman of the Editorial Board of the rested Compass and now a media consultant.
Idowu spoke on the legal and ethical dimension of fair and balanced reporting, Olorunyomi on the case of online media reporting, Olayinka on broadcast media and Agunbiade on the role of editorial gatekeepers in election reporting.
The radical scholar and human rights activist, Professor Jibrin Ibrahim, was to have spoken on the proprietorial influence on reporting but he did not turn up, probably due to circumstances beyond his control. However, the gap his absence left was filled by a robust discussion of the widespread concern over what seems to be the ascendancy in the ownership of the media by frontline politicians. This ascendency, everyone seemed agreed, poses a serious challenge to the integrity and credibility of the media.
All told, the workshop, as I said, was highly stimulating and educating. The tone was set by LASU’s Oso. Objectivity in reporting, he argued plausibly, may be desirable but it is impossible to achieve because we all have our biases and prejudices. However, because it is desirable, it motivates us to be fair and balanced in our judgments. This, in turn, means we must strive to be factual and accurate and consider all sides to an issue in our reporting.
This much all participants seemed agreed upon. Problem was that this, invariably, is easier said than practiced.
Many journalists may not be as knowledgeable as they should about, say, the laws of libel or copyright or invasion of privacy. They may also not be as knowledgeable as they should be about the ethics of journalism as codified by the Nigerian Press Organization, the umbrella body of the Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria, the Nigerian Guild of Editors, the Nigerian Union of Journalists and the Broadcasting Organization of Nigeria. But no journalist can say he does not know that he must check out the accuracy of a story and talk to all sides of the story before he publishes it as news.
Yet all too often, journalists pass off their biases and prejudices or those of their benefactors as news. Of course, journalists, like everyone else, are entitled to their views. That is why columns exist for them to pontificate on those views. But no one has any right to pass on his views as news. And even in pontificating on his views the columnist owes himself and the profession a duty to base them on facts rather than on his fancy.
Facts, of course, can also be problematic, if only because almost always they are meaningless outside the context in which they occur. Take, for example, the controversy stirred by INEC’s now abandoned plan to increase the country’s polling units ahead of next year’s elections to make voting as easy as possible for everyone. The source of the controversy was the highly skewed ratio of the increase for the North, where the commission’s chairman, Jega, comes from, against the increase for the South – a ratio of roughly three to one.
Politicians from the South seized on this fact to accuse the chairman of conspiring to rig the election for the presumed presidential candidate from his region. Yet the proportion of the increase between the two regions was meaningless outside the context of the ratio of the existing number of polling units, the ratio of the registered voters and the ratio of the land size between the two regions, where, for example, Niger State with 74,108.58 square kilometres of land, the second largest after Borno (75,480.91), and a population of nearly four million, is more than two and a half times the size of the five South-Eastern states combined and has a population about one quarter that of those states. In spite of these figures Niger State has only 3,185 polling units spread over its huge land, compared to 15,549 for the South-East. Borno has only 3,933.
Clearly the media reporting of the story of INEC’s aborted plan to increase the polling units in the country was anything but fair and balanced. On the contrary it was simply orchestrated to blackmail the commission into dropping its plan and amply succeeded in doing so.
Again, just like facts can be problematic so also can ethics, if only because not all ethics are universal. Besides, they can sometimes clash and one is then faced with deciding which is higher. Then again, there is the challenge posed to journalism ethics by the emergence of the so-called New Media, aka, Social Media, as a result of the invention of the internet at the turn of this century.
“The medium”, as Herbert Marshall McLuhan, the late Canadian philosopher of communication theory and public intellectual, once said, “is the message.” In other words the medium, whether print, radio or broadcast, determines the shape and character of the message it carries. An implication of this is that there should be different ethics for different medium.
Olorunyomi, Premium Times boss, disagrees with this relativism in journalism’s ethics in his paper and I completely agree with him. Speed may be of essence for the Social or New Media but it cannot be an excuse for not checking out a story for its accuracy, balance and fairness before publishing it. The centrality of election as a measure of the quality of a democracy makes these values even more crucial in reporting elections whatever the medium.
At least four things can get in the way of balanced and fair reporting not just of elections but of everything else. These are a reporter’s conscience, the ownership of his medium, the statutory regulatory organs of his profession, like the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission (NBC), and, of course, government itself through its use or abuse of its security organs.
A reporter with a conscience is not easily swayed by any consideration to write a jaundiced story but when, as is widely the case in this country, he is relatively poorly paid by his employers, if at all, and when, as Olayinka, the boss of BCOS, points out in his presentation, a regulatory organ like the NBC is blatantly selective in the application of its regulations between, on the one hand, Federal Government owned media and those in its support, and on the other hand, those owned privately or by opposition states, and when the Federal Government itself uses its security organs all too often to intimidate reporters, then the reporter’s job becomes very difficult, if not impossible.
The stakes are obviously high in the next election. This makes it imperative for the media, print, broadcast and New, to report it with fairness and balance. The key to doing so is journalism with a conscience. The test of this is a positive answer to each and every one of Idowu’s simple five questions about a news item, namely, is it factual, is it in the public interest, is it fair to all sides, is the language civil rather than abusive, and has it rejected being compromised by money or any other consideration?
Since it is naive to think politicians, especially those in power, will allow journalists to do their jobs with conscience, the question is, how far can journalists resist outside pressures to compromise their consciences? The answer will determine how fair and balanced their reporting of next year’s election is.
