He would usually gather children around him and tell them where he bought his watch and how much it cost him. He would tell them how many Rolls Royce cars he owns, even though the children have no idea what a Rolls Royce is. He would later pretend to the host of a TV talk show that he does not know the number of the Rolls Royce make among his fleet of cars. He hands over gifts, usually a tie and a handkerchief to journalists. He dissipates superfluous thoughts with careless abandon and puffs away his cigar like no chimney’s business. He likes Burberry designs and wants them really colourful. He talks like a millionaire, yet when you ask him if he has millions, he wades into his Americanisms and yells: ‘I would be a fool to tell you that.’ After that he laughs with the pomposity of a royal peacock and would want everybody to believe that all that drama is commonsense, just as the name of his radio programme goes. He wants to be president of Ghana on the ticket of the United Renaissance Party. That is Kofi Wayo.
Mr. Wayo recently made a statement in Sunyani, the Brong Ahafo regional capital that the Ghanaian media are in bed with the government, and have therefore become toothless bulldogs. He said this when he visited the region to open the regional offices of the URP. It is not the first time he has accused the media of singing the praise of the government; he does it all the time and we hear him all the time. Do we take everything he says with a pinch of salt, as we did when he said Prof Kofi Awoonor likes women with very big breasts, or we could take him serious sometimes? Chucks is a mouthful, we know.
Well, let’s make some sense out of what Wayo is saying about the Ghanaian media. Is he very wrong? Even if Kofi hadn’t made the comment, I was going to write about journalism this week anyway. The Guardian newspaper in the UK, had invited me to attend an Insight into Journalism course at their newsroom in Farringdon, central London. I was so excited about the opportunity that I thought I would finally make it to the editorial desk of a very good British newspaper. I had, in fact, bought a special suit for the course when an email came through that I didn’t make to the final selection list. What is final selection list? They had officially invited me and given me directions to the venue. They had actually asked me if I was allergic to any foods, and I had replied that ‘anything goes for the son of man.’ ‘We will be glad to meet you, Mr. Tawiah,’ the email had concluded. Then the stinker came through two days before the event: ‘We are sorry to disappoint you…’ They promised to give me a place on the next programme in August 2007. I filled the usual questionnaire and sent it. Again, I was taken out at the eleventh hour, after I had bragged about the breakthrough to my friends. What kind of journalism are they practicing there? I nearly wanted to ask them if it had anything to do with my colour, but I didn’t think it did. They had found my two sample articles satisfactory; something bad must have gone wrong. May be, the witches are at it again.
So, as you can see, I am mad about journalism this week. If The Daily Graphic or The Crusading Guide had done this to me in Ghana, who would I be blaming? I could start from considering the political persuasion of the editor of the state-owned Daily Graphic. I am mostly likely to find that he is a government appointee and therefore, a praise singer of the incumbent political organization. If I happen to be a known critic of the government, I am likely to conclude that I was kicked out because of my unfavorable commentary about the government. That could make sense sometimes, and it does happen even in the advanced democracies, where the media is generally independent.
On the other hand, if I happened to be a sympathizer of the former NDC administration, and the Crusading Guide had found me unsuitable for such a training programme, I am likely to consider the relationship Monsieur Kweku Baako has had with Mr. Asamasi since the June 4 revolution. I would instantly think of the present Scancem cement saga and conclude that the only other hand in my rejection is my affiliation to the ex-President, even though I am now fairly neutral. This is also a likely development.
In all these, we haven’t considered the administrative difficulties the host may have encountered. It could well be that on all two occasions, I didn’t really make the points the Guardian was expecting. I had been put on the waiting list, pending that if anybody failed to turn up, I would be considered. It is also normal to think that they had done further checks on my CV, and had realized that a future training programme that would treat international reporting will be suitable for an African journalist. It would be worthwhile to consider that the Guardian may have found my calibre unsuitable on all two occasions. Even so, it is reasonable to ask why they bothered to invite me for the second time, if they had found me unsuitable in the first instance.
Sometimes, it is difficult to say what constitutes improper moral behaviour among journalists and what is professionally unethical. Does a journalist compromise his professional integrity if he openly supports a government activity? Is he in bed with the government because he criticized the opposition or he is a toothless bulldog because he failed to question the importance of a government activity when everybody thought there was cause for concern? If a newspaper’s agenda on a particular government project is to search, kill and destroy, should it necessarily fail to see the good side of it? If at a point the paper decides to give that project some positive reportage, is it becoming a toothless bulldog? Of course, there are times it is quite clear that things are not clear with the way some journalists dispense the watchdog function. Often you can’t tell whether they are in bed with the government or they only laid the bed for the government.
That is exactly the problem I had when I decided to do a dissertation on adversarial journalism years ago. My professor asked me what exactly I would be looking at in a study of that nature, and whether I understood the word adversarial. By adversarial, I was also thinking of mercenary journalism or the kind of vendetta journalism that allows a media practitioner to devote himself to bringing down a particular target willy-nilly. I didn’t find it particularly great that a newspaper could write on one character everyday when there were important socio-economic issues to be discussed. I was worried about sensationalism and teasing headlines that didn’t offer much in the body of the story. As it came out, I didn’t have an operational definition of adversarial journalism or how I was going to measure what constituted it. After a successful attempt at confusing myself, I realized that the topic I had decided on was going to be my adversary if I did not drop it. The humble academic looked me in the eye and told me to do something measurable. I decided to write on the practice of public relations in the hospitality industry. That wasn’t a problem at all, because PR itself is quite amorphous, so anyhow you looked at it, there would be a story to tell. My only caution was not to write pubic relations for public relations, because pubic affairs are mostly never made public.
This was shortly after ace broadcaster Kwaku Sakyi-Addo hosted NDC guru Dr Tony Aidoo on Kwaku One on One. In his usual bombastic ‘no nonsense’ style, Dr Aidoo asked the interviewer why the NPP had given him a role in a media related activity. He quizzed: ‘And you, why are you on that board?’ I don’t remember Mr. Sakyi-Addo’s answer to that question, but I remember it provoked some reaction in me. Was it wrong for Kwaku to have accepted to offer his expertise to help his country in his professional capacity? I would later write a letter to the editor of the Daily Graphic, questioning why Kwaku had asked Dr Aidoo personal questions about the kind of things he smokes. I had felt it was quite improper, not journalistically though, for any person to ask a seemingly decent fellow what he smokes, when tobacco is the only legal substance permitted to be smoked in Ghana. The next day, a friend who had read the piece called me to express his disappointment at my loyalty to the NDC functionary. He said if he knew I was a member of the NDC party, he would not have associated with me at university.
Was I in bed with the NDC because I expressed my opinion on something that had nothing to do with politics at all? I would later write another article about President Kufour’s first official media encounter, in which I commended the performance of the president. The same friend called again to ask if I had switched camps to the NPP. Of course, sometimes it becomes funny if a person says that he does not support any political party, when he votes during party elections. You would vote for only one party even if you sympathise with five. It means that you would prefer one party to another at a point, and that preference could be based on something as intangible as instinct. Even so, political neutrality is something that most journalists aspire to, and many are doing well.
Journalists are a microcosm of society; once society has room for crooks and thieves, there would always be biased and bribe-extorting journalists. So, Mr. Bright Blewu’s invitation to the public to report all corrupt journalists is very heartwarming. Then again, determining corrupt journalism is not very easy. You are corrupt when you fail to be responsible. And if you have noticed, these days the phrase ‘responsible journalism’ is being shunned by even media practitioners who insist on living by the ethics of the profession. Andrew Marr, the host of the BBC’s Sunday A.M talk show, asks: ‘Responsible to whom? The state? Never. To the people? But which people, and of what views? To the readers? It is vanity to think you know them. Responsible, then to some general belief in truth and accuracy? Well, that will be nice.’
Almost everyday, we encounter some ethical dilemmas. Should journalists ever edit a quote? It is professional to tape a conversation and not inform the interviewee? If I accept Omotuo and Abenkatekonto and give the giver a mention in my radio programme, am I less corrupt than the other chap who received thick wads of cash and did a long feature?
What about paying sources-chequebook journalism? May be, we should talk of efficks rather than ethics, because many of the things we do are too political to categorise.
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