Swaziland: Give us news - the first job of the media [opinion]

News is the Number One business of the newspaper, and indeed, the media in general. 'News' is new information, delivered regularly and timeously; that is, as close to the occurrence of the event as possible.

 

This article is not designed to discuss ethics and professional conduct of journalists as its main subject, so it deliberately makes reference to them only when the subject of 'news' as against 'propaganda' is discussed.

 

In certain quarters, education and entertainment are listed as duties of the press, perhaps even at the same level as news.  That is erroneous: -*Botswana is an underdeveloped country in which the imperialists - call them colonialists if you wish - deliberately discriminated in favour of the colonial civil servants in the gathering and dissemination of news, ignoring the needs of the colonised.  The resident commissioners, and later, the district commissioners - were kept abreast of developments in the territories by mail, which also carried publications of the colonising country, often sent by the police and soldiers by railway or on horseback.  They also communicated information from the imperial government by radio, telex and Morse code, often reporting on movements of the liberation movements and opposition politicians in the colonies and in the places where some of them studied in the capitals of the imperialist countries.  In that regard, the press of the day, ambiguously referred to as 'the media' in the conservative quarters of modern journalism, served the ruling class and excluded the subject peoples.

 

*There is not enough space in the press to accommodate all the necessary information that should bring the peoples of the underdeveloped countries up to par with those of the developed countries.  The greater part of the press, at its most typical in Botswana, is largely state-owned and controlled, steadily degenerating into an instrument of propaganda for the conservative chiefs, army generals and the corrupt sections of the civil service. 

 

 The very size of the state operation dwarfs the 'free and independent press' almost making it an unworkable economic enterprise.  In Botswana, the state runs the only national news agency, one television and two radio stations, a daily national newspaper, a cultural magazine and several other publications.  The splintered private sector runs seven established newspapers, three radio stations and a television station operating on human, financial and technological resources easily less than half those of the state enterprise. 

 

*The tax-payer underwrites the budget of the state press, whilst the private press runs on expensive borrowings. The state therefore has unlimited and guaranteed means by which to finance its operations whilst the private press is exposed to the rigours of the notorious 'market', also required to abide by professional ethics and codes of conduct, which are only a rumour at the state press.

 

The conditions under which the press operates in the underdeveloped countries do not allow for the luxuries of 'education' and 'entertainment', which is taken for granted in the developed countries.  The imperialist press spent more on a smaller audience.  It had unlimited space for fewer officers.  It enjoyed plentiful resources - most of them gleaned from the lean economies of the underdeveloped countries - to run their press.

 

The underdeveloped countries have to make up for the 'news' deficit that they inherited from the colonial era. That is not made any easier by the inclination of the neo-colonial governments that inherit the colonial press and adapt it to the needs of the new, slightly expanded ruling class, augmented by the chiefs, the army, the business community and a thin layer of professionals.  The 'masses' benefit only marginally from the news - read propaganda - that they get from the state media under the guise of 'development news'.

 

Whereas 'entertainment' in the developed countries denotes cultural and technological enrichment, in the underdeveloped countries the connotation is quite the opposite.

 

Entertainment in the Scandinavian countries refers to the rediscovery, exploration and restoration of nature and the acoustic sound, whereas in the African countries it means dabbling in witchcraft, sexual mischief, evangelical madness, ritual murder, violent crime, petty official corruption and mimicking of anything and everything that happens at Hollywood.

 

In the African countries, the notion of 'entertainment' is stripped of its development ingredient.  It is corrupted to feed on the vices to which the masses of the people have been made vulnerable by poverty and the general absence of development. A western scholar made the observation: "They are poor and they do not have much, but they are always happy."

 

Their permanent stay there suits the leaders just fine because the people remain uncritical of government and their analytical faculties are just as underdeveloped as the country. So, the people can be manipulated and bullied at the whim of the rulers.   Entertainment is used as a drug to dull the intellectual capabilities of the poor and exploited.

 

In the rare case when the media carries positive entertainment; the type that seeks to liberate the mind and the body; the type that seeks to promote the wholesome development of the human being, it should serve only to augment the 'news' in all its varied forms of presentation.  That is, hard news, analysis, opinion and features, including reporting on sports and culture or entertainment.

 

At the risk of entering into the realm of semantics, the point should also be made that education is the core business of the school system.  Whatever education happens in the media should only come to augment the primary business of the media: news.

 

In other words, the duty of the journalists is to provide the raw material - the facts and the figures, the building blocks - that the active citizen will then use to paint a picture of the larger world with the mental tools at his disposal.  Even where analysis or opinion is done, it must rely on the 'hard news' that the newspaper or the radio has already given the reader or listener.  Analysis and opinion are no substitute for hard news.  They follow hard news.That brings us to the central point of this article; that the Botswana media suffers from a serious dearth of news, even as it has developed into a picturesque medium of communication in the short 27 years since, the establishment of the first regular private newspaper, The Botswana Guardian.

 

The largest body of the reporting leans more towards trivia and propaganda than in the direction 'news'.The state offers the bulk of 'information' - perhaps 60 to 75 percent - under the guise of development news.  In reality, these are public announcements that seek to promote and advertise the works of the ruling party, the government of the day and the ruling class.  It is by any professional measure, propaganda and disinformation, lately used by the presidency to manipulate public opinion and to promote autocratic and military rule.

 

There is a total blackout on current events apart from those in which the state operatives are required to report the views of the president and traditionalists of the Botswana Democratic Party as they attempt to sort out their sectarian political business.  The state media - perhaps once a little more liberal - has now been made an extension of the public relations arm of the Botswana Defence Force, the secret police services and the foreign affairs ministry.

 

Otherwise, their microphones and cameras are forever on the heels of the president and his ministers as they go about addressing Kgotla, council and BDP meetings wherever and whenever they occur.  All this is subsidised by the tax-payers, close to half of whom vote against the ruling party if we ignore the anomalies that skew representation in Parliament much to the favour of the BDP. 

 

By all international standards, the work of the state information services now, more than ever before, emulates the style of Hitler's Germany and Verwoerd's South Africa. Propaganda, disinformation and more propaganda!

 

That is the reason for the call for a genuine public media to mitigate against the abuse of public funds in the interests of the ruling party, also compensating for the inadequacies of the private press in pursuing the public interest in the areas of education and culture.

 

The private press, which must be tolerated even as it is driven more by profit than by unqualified pursuit of the best ideals of journalism, takes the cue from the state press, forever dwelling on the sectarian political interests of the ruling class at the expense of the poor and voiceless who need the media far much more than the ruling party and the government.

 

For the better part of the first episode in the battle of the Basarwa against forced relocation by the government out of the Central Kgalagadi Game Reserve, the private press ran with the state even accusing Roy Sesana of the First People of the Kgalagadi of conspiring with Stephen Cory of Survival International in undermining Botswana diamonds abroad. Now the public knows the truth that the press seems reluctant to tell with the same vigour as when they chastised Sesana.

 

The story of the day is Nchindo's memoirs, Debswana and De Beers at the expense of the story of wholesale resignations among management at Orapa and Jwaneng and impending retrenchment of workers at the mines running into the thousands.

 

The other is the possibility of a new Botswana Democratic Party, which will certainly oppose autocratic rule at the BDP and in government though it has not announced an agenda that will identify with working class Botswana, the poor, homeless, uneducated, ill, landless and jobless.  All in all, the private press, having done a glorious job in exposing some government corruption, encroachment of the state and its president on civil liberties and the pervasive malfunctions of the state, has failed to redirect public attention in the direction of the daily trials and tribulations of the citizenry.

 

Community-based media would be best positioned to occupy that space though that will require extensive campaigning among the civil society organisations and the advanced democracies of the civilised world to finance that project.A genuine public media will be required to temper the political interests of the ruling party and the profiteering orientation of the private press in order to serve the citizens where neither of these interest groups will be interested or capable.

 

The point is that there is little or no 'news' over the weekend because the newspapers and radio stations are preoccupied with 'entertainment' on those days, which is not their primary business.  The newspaper doors are closed.  The editors attend church and cattle.  The journalists are busy making up for what they missed during the week.

 

The radio stations play music throughout, which is not their core business.  The country and the press literally go to sleep.  Just what the government wants! And when the private media finally wakes up on Monday, it finds that the state press has made strident steps towards the promotion of the president's agenda to which the people were compelled to surrender for lack of an alternative.

 

The weekend is, however, only a reflection of the manner in which the media establishment perceives its obligation to the citizens at any hour of the day, any day.  To put it mildly: irresponsible. That is why the citizens - the readers and listeners - need journalists in the newsrooms and fewer educationists and entertainers.

 

- March 31, 2010 by Rampholo Molefehe

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Source: www.mmegi.bw/index.php (accessed on 31.03.10)