Media dilemma: Who is to blame?

May 27, 2005

LAST week, three rather unrelated media reports caught my eye particularly because of the way in which they were indicative of the dilemma and pressures the media currently facse.

Andrew Kanyegirire
LAST week, three rather unrelated media reports caught my eye particularly because of the way in which they were indicative of the dilemma and pressures the media currently facse.

In the first report, in his Ear to the Ground, Charles Onyango Obbo used the 1980s activism and courageous journalism of Munnansi to measure the performance of today’s media. On reading the piece, one is left with the impression that today’s media is ‘toothless’ and not geared up for taking on a ‘watchdog’ role in the current political transition.

In the second instance, on the same day, both The New Vision and The Monitor, in their business sections, reported that during a PricewaterhouseCoopers breakfast, leaders in the corporate sector had called upon the press to be proactive in promoting corporate governance in both the private and public sectors.

The press was also advised to be ethical and aware of its own interests during their dealings with the business community.

In the third news report, the media was singled out by information minister, James Nsaba Buturo, for not being patriotic particularly with regard to its coverage of the reduced donor funds saga.

The one constant between all these reports is the expected role of the press.
Whichever way you look at it, faced with the interests of donors, the public, advertisers and the Government calls for patriotism in an environment of cut-throat competition — newspapers are being forced to juggle various interests and ethical dilemmas. Simply put, they are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Bearing this in mind, it is not surprising that not much good is being said about the press given that in its attempt to address the diverse interests, it ends up being toothless on so many issues.
It must be noted that the media in general is in this position partly due to its own poor judgments.

For instance, business leaders have for sometime now been expressing concern about the way the media neglecst wellknown cases of bad business ethics and practices.

In most cases, the media tends to treat business with kid gloves, it is not suspicious of businesses and does not take them to task with regard to their services to the public.

Part of the issue here is that today the media in Uganda is also big businesses that have to keep tabs on their profit margins. Media houses are big profit ventures first, entertainers second and watchdogs last.

They have the same interests as those of their advertisers and the business elite that appear in their reportage. This limits their ability to scrutinise the activities of the business community.

It is also for some of these reasons that the media is, therefore, not shy about wearing its interests on its sleeves for all to see.

The way we have handled the reduced donor funds saga has left a lot to be desired. The knee-jerk reportage on the countless number of studies that have all of a sudden popped up on Uganda as a ‘bad’ destination for donor funds, has been rushed, one sided and elitist.

In some cases, donors have been quoted willy-nilly regardless of their vested interests, expertise or experience in the hands-on management of a potentially fragile post-colonial nation state.

In addition, commendable as it is for the media to expose cases of corruption and cronyism, this should not, however, be taken to mean that the public should therefore be kept abreast on each and every detail of, say, the First Family.

Simply highlighting the goings on of the First Family does not necessarily mean the media is holding the President to account.

Hounding individual members simply because of who they are without according them the right to reply is against the very ethos of freedom of expression— a value that we in the media seem to reserve only for ourselves.

Do not get me wrong, I am not saying journalists should go about their reportage softly with a pen in one hand and a Ugandan flag in the other, but rather, we need to work towards a professional, objective and a really critical edge in our reportage.

As a media practitioner, I also know that it is not possible for journalists to report freely and fairly without intimidation from the powerful in society.

Still, I for one would like to see less-stories on this or that person and more stories on issues that could be used by the public to form their decisions about the destiny of Uganda. Stories on, say, the PEAP, human rights, the cost of war, labour laws, high ATM, banking and airtime fees, the misuse of donor funds by NGOs and the rise of the moral brigade.

To dislodge itself from the toothless position of being stuck between a rock and a hard place, the media needs to take a close look at itself and decide which issues it is going to prioritise.

The writer is a lecturer at Rhodes University, South Africa, where he is also pursuing his Ph.D.

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