Liberia: ‘Saving’ the media in a day - another training workshop for journalists... by Tom Kamara

When an official of UNMIL stood tall to boastfully announce the millions he claimed his organization has pumped into the local media to rescue it from mediocrity and paralysis, he failed to give specifics.There are enticing programs of improving the media here, but most of the money, if not all, go into infinite one day, two days, workshops and advertisement. Summed up, this was considered assistance to the media. Advertisement here, at reduced price for institutions like UNMIL on demand because of frequency, is considered ‘assistance,’ not service. Workshops, with impractical themes for individuals incapable of conceiving and writing a straight news story, let alone an in-depth news feature or analysis, are deemed the best training platforms. They are not and cannot be.

Workshops with parachute ‘experts’ brought in for highly attractive fees are almost endless here for media practitioners and others needing practical training at all levels. Millions are pumped into them annually, even from the government.

This is because they are convenient channels of siphoning money with glossy report back to sponsors at headquarters of how well the money has been used to achieve desired objectives beyond expectations. Based on the number of workshops and experts flown in for them, the Liberian media should now be far better and professional. To the contrary, it is deteriorating faster.

Journalism is a profession requiring training and skills development. It takes years, not days at coffee drinking and eating workshops, to train a journalist at academic and practical levels, and the trainee must have the requisite background to excel.
This is not the case here. The workshops are designed to please headquarters, local partners, and not to achieve any objective of producing better trained professional journalists. If a person cannot compose a simple paragraph coherently, it is unlikely that a workshop can transform such a person into a productive and professional journalist. Medical doctors and engineers are not trained at workshops. Journalists cannot be.
The Liberian media is in deep and serious crisis, a crisis largely emanating from the terrible education system and its rapidly deteriorating trends. Schools that produce semi-illiterate graduates cannot be the pillars for producing professional and creative journalists. Thus salvation is needed, but blind and imposed prescriptions from donors are not the answers. NGOs are unlikely to be the medicine men to save the media as it slumps.

When USAID announced its $11m program for 5 years for the media through the International Research Exchange Board (IREX), the news sounded just too good to believe since this is Liberia.
IREX announced that it was accepting applications, but some media houses, like this one, were skeptical. The bride was too beautiful to approach. The applications, cumbersome and complicated, contained request for detailed and confidential information from media entities, amongst them their bank account number and statement, how they run their finances, and their areas of need. At the end of it, IREX announced that it made a mistake on the forms because all it wants is to train journalists, nothing more. It has no money or equipment to offer. It could help with areas like drawing a ‘business plan’, etc.  If so, why ask for a bank account number and statement? Why bother about the financial system? Why ask for legal documents, such as Articles of Incorporation? Were these necessary for conducting workshops?

On the other hand, IREX has operated in other countries at different levels and with different designs, providing equipment, money and concrete training in their use, along with other forms of more serious training for journalists. In Eastern Europe after the fall of Soviet Communism, Afghanistan, etc., IREX intervened with millions, equipping media entities and training journalists outside the workshop model it is bent on imposing here for those who apply.
But there were cases of corruption in IREX.  According to a report from ITAR-TASS World Service, “on 17 April 2006, the former head of the Tbilisi-based office of IREX, Salome Mudzhiri (from 2003-2005) and her husband, David Rogava, were arrested in the Georgia on embezzlement charges.”

This is not to suggest that IREX-Liberia, in its infancy, falls in the same category. But its prescriptions for rescuing the paralyzed media, with millions of American taxpayers’ money as its weapon, must be rewarding and productive, with the warning that dumping money in the wrong areas will lead to the wrong results. Giving Aids patients painkillers is not understanding the nature and intensity of the illness. Those who wish to run after IREX’s millions should ensure going beyond cosmetics. The problem is serious.

- October 21.10.2010 by Tom Kamara

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Source: www.newdemocratnews.com/index.php (accessed on 25.10.2010)

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or position of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.