Uganda deserves trained journalists

Sep 27, 2011

FIRST, the good news; Uganda today has some good journalists who excel and make one proud of the media in this country.

By Mary Karooro Okurut

FIRST, the good news; Uganda today has some good journalists who excel and make one proud of the media in this country.

Bad news; we have many more people in the media whose level of reporting is so bad you wonder where this industry is headed.

The problem is the huge majority of media practitioners are people parading themselves as journalists whereas they are not.

Media reports abound of people arrested posing as policemen, doctors, intelligence agents, and the like. Well, like many professions, the media has its share of masqueraders.

Many media houses are known to take on primary or secondary school dropouts who simply begin filing news reports and tagging themselves ‘journalists’. They are cheaper to hire because they settle for small remuneration. The media owners are happy with such a lot because they spend less on staff salaries and allowances.

But the result is that these reporters mix up issues and misinform the public. Their capacity to understand and interpret political, economic or even simple social phenomena and package them appropriately for public consumption is either low or non-existent for the most part.

They do not comprehend matters of national development, political or economic processes or climate change and so on.

Many newsmakers incessantly complain about the level of reporting.

They say one thing and the journalists report something completely different.

There are too many embarrassing errors of fact – erroneously referred to by the same media as ‘factual errors’ – some of them on the front pages of otherwise reputable newspapers.

These are usually caused by poor news gathering techniques, lack of tradition of rigorous cross-checking of facts and downright poor editing.

It is interesting that in many news outlets, the editors, who ought to be the gatekeepers, ensuring quality control, are themselves either untrained in journalism or are novices in the profession so that they have no idea which street they are on.

Even the news itself has, in many instances, tended to be of low quality. There is often a huge disconnect between the content of press conferences and the coverage offered in the news bulletins thereafter. Journalists often choose the sensational rather than the important, showing a rather skewed and narrow appreciation of news value.

The media is an institution that wields immense power in society; meaning that there is also an attendant high level of responsibility that must be exercised. But truth is that the proliferation of media outlets (more than 200 radio stations, some two dozen television outlets, and about 50 magazines and newspapers) and the huge numbers of practitioners all tagged ‘journalists’ has not been matched by an equivalent rise in the quality of journalism practised.

The tradition has been that anybody who can write – never mind how poorly - or who has a good broadcasting voice for radio and a nice face for television can be admitted to practise and thereby becomes a journalist.

The Press and Journalist Act 1995 defines ‘a journalist’ as “a person enrolled to practise as a journalist under this Act”. The Act proceeds to lay down rather strict conditions precedent for one to enroll as a journalist.

Among other things it provides that the person seeking to practise must be licensed to do so by the Media Council which is set up by the same statute.

And for the Media Council to issue a practising certificate, it must satisfy itself that the person is qualified and possess such a certificate.

The Act provides that the person must have a basic university degree and a qualification in journalism. The reading of this should be that anyone who wants to be called a journalist under the Act should have attained university education – in whatever discipline – and then something akin to a diploma in journalism. When this law was enacted, there was an outcry from sections of the public that the Government was trying to muzzle ‘the free press’.

But the more informed argued that the law had been long overdue because journalism has, for many years, been infiltrated by unqualified people.

The Government has been very kind to the media industry. The Media Council has been in place all these years, but some of the rules have been relaxed by way of non-enforcement, purely as affirmative action to those who had not had the chance – or seen the wisdom – of acquiring the relevant academic qualifications to do so.

There was further good reason to do so: at that time (1995) there were only two journalism training institutions in Uganda – the Uganda Management Institute (formerly the Institute of Public Administration, which for many years had been the only journalism training institution offering diplomas), and Makerere University, which came up with a degree course in Mass Communication around 1988.

And for many years there had been just one university in Uganda – the good old Makerere, until the late 1980s when the Islamic University in Uganda opened its doors, followed by more than 20 other universities, both public and private which today number 30 odd.

Most of these universities offer journalism and mass communication degrees, among others. And there are also many more journalism training institutions offering certificates and diplomas.

This wide spectrum of opportunity calls for journalists to take their profession seriously and acquire the requisite training. Just because a law has not been enforced does not mean it does not exist. It can be enforced at any time and without notice – obviously to the detriment of unprepared journalism practitioners.

Society demands and deserves much better journalism than we see today.

And even then, a

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