Comment

In search of an identity: African news media and the public need to know

Eronini R. Megwa

All over the world, the news media are generally expected to chronicle events and pan their watchdog lenses on society to bring to the fore events and issues important to the public. In performing these important functions, the media are compelled by economic and organisational imperatives to evaluate and select events and issues.

This discriminatory practice invariably shrinks reality. It creates the impression that issues and events not appearing in the news flow of the day are not important, non-existent. The news media are quite adept at persuasively advancing and ferociously defending this illusion because their survival hinges on this powerful propaganda. The structure of news, how news is packaged, presented regularly and consistently, is part of the persuasive strategy adopted by the news media to create an image of completeness and reliability. As a result, the public has come to accept this as the norm and thus uncritically believes that the media are ubiquitous, all-seeing, all-powerful, and all-knowing. In reality, journalists are not super human, and those whom they work for are not money-minting organisations (some people believe they are), and neither are they in every community nor do they have that Orwellian Big Brother radar in every nook and corner of society.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Africa where news media presence is scanty and their reach is limited. The news media in Africa strain to cover issues that matter to Africans. The main reason for this is that they have sold their souls to the devil, that is to market forces, mainly by modeling their news gathering and reporting on false gods, 'objectivity' and 'inverted pyramid', the very same gods worshiped by their western colleagues and used by them to make or break individuals and institutions. Consequently, issues important to the majority of Africans do not make it to the news media's news shrine and therefore fail to receive the blessings of those who guard this news shrine.

This has led to the perception that the news media in Africa are too uncaring about the poor and illiterate, about women and children, a majority of whom live in isolated and insulated rural areas, where they remain powerless, invisible and voiceless. This uncaring attitude is un-African. It is devoid of the spirit of ubuntu -being a good neighbour. It is an attitude associated with the journalistic cultures and values of Europe and North America whose essence is largely premised on the economic logic of profitability and survivability and whose news culture has an unbridled bias for scandal, oddity and disorder and an insatiable appetite for violence and gore.

The news gathering model and reporting style of Africa's news media lack the story-telling motifs that are familiar and meaningful to Africans. As a result, they negate the issues that concern Africans. African journalists, as Africa's modern day story-tellers, need to be more socially responsible and tell stories that are relevant and meaningful to Africans, stories that capture the daily struggles and problems faced by a majority of Africans, stories of how to survive, among other things, famine, hunger, malnutrition, disease, and unemployment.

To do this effectively, African news media will first have to grapple with the reality that the traditional notion of watchdog journalism has lost its appeal; that 'objectivity' as a news paradigm, has lost its explanatory potency, and should now be consigned to the same dustbin of journalistic history as 'yellow journalism' and 'muckraking'.

African journalism needs journalistic models that will offer solutions to problems, expand the public sphere to include millions and millions of Africans who remain disenfranchised by their government and marginalised by their media's inextricable dependency on western-inspired market-driven news gathering and reporting styles. In the minds of many Africans, this dependence conjures images of the exclusion, oppression, and deprivation suffered by Africans under colonialism and apartheid. It perpetuates a hegemonic system that muffles African journalism and renders journalists mute.

The news media in Africa should seek ways to strike a balance between the economic imperatives of profit-making and the democratic and civic mandates of participation and development, adjust their surveillance lenses to provide the African public with frames and stories that reflect the current concerns and interests of Africa and Africans. The media in Africa also need to resist the easy temptation of cheap, foul-mouthed, unintelligent and sometimes overzealous reporting that has fanned the ambers of hatred and xenophobia that have led to violence and war in some parts of the African continent. If African journalists have to be overzealous, they should do so when they report about poverty and disease, about human rights, problems that have for decades provided bone-crushing challenges for Africans.

To tell these stories effectively, African journalists will have to take a bold step: extricate themselves from the stranglehold of western-inspired and profit-driven journalism. In doing so, they would have broken the horrendous culture of silence and acquiescence their reliance on the objectivity paradigm and inverted pyramid has imposed on Africans and their journalists. This confrontation is inevitable and it is a good first step in the search for a much-desired identity for African journalism.