When a man decides to sing like a ‘Sylvan historian’, we normally expect him to use a good melodious plot to “express A Flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme”. So, when such a man makes our rhyme the poorer, by confusing Professor Joe Amoako-Tuffour with Dr Kwame Amoako-Tuffour, the reading community has more than a good reason to question his professional reputation, in much the same way as the fraternity of Romantic poets descended on Thomas Chatterton when he was found to be a forger of pseudo-medieval poetry. Chatterton chose suicide over retraction, perhaps because of the ‘intellectual tyranny’ that prevailed in the late 18th Century. With my honour abused, I have chosen retraction and ‘professional integrity’ over suicide. And, that is because the noble academic whose profile I quoted, or perhaps misquoted in the first part of this article, Professor Joe Amoako-Tuffour of St Francis Xavier University, Canada, is an extraordinary gentleman who would pour rose water on a toad any day, and remain noble everyday.
Just as there are a lot of names, there are a lot of Odes, and it is usually tempting to be all Greek to their authors. But a well-intentioned poetry lover does not do the poetry genre any good if he confuses Elizabeth Carter’s Ode To Melancholy with John Keats’ Ode on Melancholy. For, the two poets treat melancholy in very different ways, the same way that two different people could share a similar name but remain different identities. And, perhaps, it was appropriate that the two poets chose to title their ‘Melancholy’ poem as such. For, it is very ‘melancholic’ for a writer to assume that any Amoako-Tuffour he stumbles on in any part of the world is the Executive Chairman of President’s Kufour’s School Feeding programme. That, unfortunately, was the confusion the original article on the above subject, which was published last week, sought to celebrate.
“What is in a name, my fellow Ghanaians”, columnist Daniel K. Pryce, asked only recently. The thesis of Pryce’s article had been that a name is a name, and a name once given, remains a name. Well, that prognosis did not sit well with Dr. Kwame Okoampah-Ahoofe, a Journalism and English professor in New York, who wrote an interesting rejoinder to the issue. The Professor was emphatic: “…Names Do Matter”. If those words had meant nothing to me then, now they strike me as a premonition thought backwards.
So, now we know that Dr Kwame Amoako-Tuffour, the politician who shot to fame in the Limann era, when he sued the Attorney-General (Amoako-Tuffour vrs The Attorney General) is the one who was attacked on Radio Gold’s Alhaji and Alhaji news analysis programme. Prof Joe Amoako Tuffour is a public intellectual at the Economics Department of St Francis Xavier University, who has quietly built a decent career over two decades, teaching, researching and writing for the intellectual community and pubic institutions. As Chair of the Economics Department, it is refreshing to know that the academic is not consigned to the scholarship-driven world of academia where important publication and research win the day; he has over the years made a good presence at Ghana’s Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning as visiting Scholar, advising and helping to fashion policies for effective governance. He has executed this function in a very non-partisan manner, for he is not a politician; he lends politicians his brains.
Eat a humble pie, Tawiah, eat a humble pie, commentators had cried. Have I eaten a humble pie? Yes. Was the pie good? I would have the honesty of Abraham Lincoln to say that “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” But more than events just controlling me, they have provoked some very important questions. At what point is the ‘checking cycle’ in journalism complete. Most accomplished practitioners in the field put a higher premium on effective fact checking than on other procedures in news reporting. The News of The World newspaper in the UK is so obsessed with this that it is usual for the Paper to hire a helicopter to monitor a sensational story and in the end shelve it, because available evidence is not as compelling as the desire to please the scandal-hungry readership of the tabloid press.
These days, every cough is enough to provoke a story. The duty we have is checking to find out whether any cough is worth a story. When properly done, the checking process continuous even after the story has been published. Good practitioners always go back to check in a surreptitious encounter with their initial sources, to check for new leads and fresher angles. A local newspaper in Buckinghamshire, UK, is quite unmistakable about this: After checking the facts, recheck, double-check, crosscheck and go back to check that the facts you checked were properly checked before you ‘check them out’. It is their house style, and they stick to it religiously. And, I think the principle has paid off, because they have only watched from the sidelines while their compatriots have become unwilling companions of the law, doling out lump-sums to settle scores and lapping up their spittle like a cat in countless retractions.
So, how difficult is the checking process? Prof Richard Keeble, an acclaimed Journalism professor at Lincoln University, UK, worries that it is fashionable these days for a journalist to sit in the comfort of his office and source a story from the PR outfit of an organization, and proceed to work it for publication. Ideally, a story on tax reform proposed by a public body should proceed through the usual ‘check mill,’ and shepherded with the same enthusiasm that a fastidious editor would attend a sex scandal involving an adulterous minister of state. After getting the view of the tax payer walking the street, we are interested in institutions that have a stake in such a proposal and also seek the view of politicians on both sides of the divide. What about the academia and traders in the informal sector? Such an exercise could transcend national boundaries. It would be nice to check with Mali or Togo, to test their reaction to such a proposal. To complete the cycle, we would need to get back to our original source, and get them to confirm if they still stand by what they have put forward. After this, we are free to go to print.
If every story proceeded this way, the writing profession will be as unexciting as a eunuch’s underpants. Indeed, Keeble concedes that this laborious process will see only a few stories published. The BBC’s website is updated every minute. Even free community newspapers try to refresh their websites with new information regularly. Should a new angle to every story go through the editing mill, as if we are gathering fresh ingredients to start a different soup? We have the recipe already, so we can go ahead and fix dinner whenever we feel noises in our stomachs. Maybe, it is well that even though the BBC is a benchmark for many media organizations in the world, the news organization has an in-house watchdog, a weekly programme appropriately named Newswatch. The programmme, which is given prime air time, seeks to highlight the ‘journalistic pitfalls’ in every news report that was aired in the week. Viewers are interviewed on the quality of a report. The judgment of broadcasting experts is also sought in an elaborate interview. These are good attempts at instituting a degree of ‘correctness’ in the routine of news gathering and news reporting, for good measure. Would you find this in a medical journal, where doctors will acknowledge their shortcomings in every heart operation they performed over a period? Do we have a monthly law report that follows this practice? What about engineering and accountancy? Well, we could find out all these from Mr. Google. Most serious professions have effective appraisal schemes in place.
The internet is a wonderful thing, a former AP reporter told me recently. Years ago, if you wanted to find out the whereabouts of an old classmate, you needed to resole your shoes for a cross-country marathon walk. These days, you could lie supine in a Jacuzzi, with chilled beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other while a chap called Google travels around the world on your behalf, visiting residential and business addresses to scoop your mate for you. Sometimes, he gives you more than you asked. A search would come complete with photographs, telephone numbers, email addresses and even names of spouses and children. And all these take a fraction of a second, and it is for free as long as your internet subscription is active. If Mr. Google fails you, you can always contact Mr. Yahoo, MSN or Ask.com. There are many other search engines on the internet.
But, the internet can also be a real net sometimes, trapping the careless user who takes its immediacy and speed for granted. Perhaps, it is unfortunate that the worldwide web is wide enough to host any buffoon. If you type the name of a well-known thief into a search engine, a few things come up. Similarly, if you casually slot in the name of a decent philanthropist who has donated millions towards the rehabilitation of thieves, a lot of things come up. The judicious user is always careful not to jumble information on the thief with results from the search on the philanthropist, because he hasn’t stolen before. And here, it is not enough to be interminable; let’s be precise on what we want to say: it is simply inexcusable to mix things up. A Ghanaian Psychology professor in North America puts it even more succinctly: “Google is a wonderful resource but it only for thoughtful and informed users.” In this regard, we have more than a professional duty to apologise to Prof Joe Amoako-Tuffour for misusing his name in our earlier story.
So, do we have any reason to goof in this rather precarious trade? Indeed, professionals of yesteryears would be astounded to see what business some of us are doing with news in a digital age. Modern recording machines are serviceable enough to separate unwanted noises from the conversation we want to record. And they are cheap. The moment you compose yourself to type a story on a computer, a gentleman pops onto the screen to ask if he can be of any help. He follows every word you write, constantly underlying wrong sentence constructions and offering useful suggestions. If you are too busy to do subheadings, another gentleman can be engaged to sort it out at no charge. But we still manage to allow typos to slip through a whole regime of checks. Oh Journalism Ahoy! Maybe one day we shall be glad to remember even these things.
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