Media: Fourth estate or fifth columnist

By Michael John

If you live in Lagos or Abuja, when was the last time you took a trip to your state? Better do and you would be surprised at the number of newspapers blossoming back home. They are sprouting up like mushrooms and soon you may have one politician, one newspaper. Newspapers which you may call scandal sheets and which have funny editors. All that some of these editors know about journalism could be put in a nutshell and you would still have space for the nut. Journalism is under threat.
It has been said that “journalism is largely about saying that Lord Jones is dead to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.” But right now there is complete madness in the practice and it now largely consists of saying “Lord Jones explodes to people who never knew Lord Jones has a bomb.” And probably they never heard that Lord Jones had incendiary tendencies and should be handled with care.
Many politicians, particularly the desperate ones, have set up community media organisations with the sole aim of vilifying and demonising their opponents. The logic is simple, “first give him a bad name, and then we hang him.” The journalists who work for them are hired character assassins, with a strong bias for rumor-mongering, libel and slander and propaganda. The only deficiency in them is that they are not conversant with the language of the trade and write such poor grammar that someone once suggested that they should be banned from speaking English and unduly influencing their kith and kin who may see them as role models. They have as much respect for truth as you have for your spittle. This is the season of madness when things fall apart and the fake journalists cannot bear the good journalism.
These newspapers are often manned by poorly trained, untrained and educationally disadvantaged writers. Their grammar betrays them and they seldom could string together a set of sentences with one unifying thought without standing grammatical conventions on their heads. And what they do to grammar, they do with more reckless abandon and ignominy to logic.
Take a sampler of headlines in these gutter Press and please do not laugh. “John explodes again!” “Stiff Opposition Expected To Governor Adamu’s Candidacy,” “Dead Kidnapper denies Kidnapping Charge,” “There is hungry in the land – Senator Udo,” “Victor in Trouble”... the list goes on.
Worst hit by the journalism madness are the states in the Niger Delta where politics seem to generate as much passion and excitement as oil. Perhaps most shocking has been the yellow journalism trend in Akwa Ibom State, the land of promise which has been transformed into the land of gossip and rumours. There, a particular Christian Institute has added to the problem instead of ameliorating it. Instead of churning out preachers and men of the robe, it is dissipating its energy in churning out journalists. The end result is that its men of the book cannot preach and its journalists cannot write. You cannot eat your holy pie and still have it, or can you? The institute churns out persons who were unable to make it to the university or polytechnic, and arm these dangerous men with diploma in journalism.
If the pen is mightier than the sword, then is this not like arming nursery school children with machine guns and having them fire in all directions? And the journeymen-journalists are having their day in the sun and equating themselves with the Ray Ekpu’s and Peter Enahoro’s of this world. They work with a swagger and carry their pens like gunslingers carry their guns in Western movies. They would not dare to introduce themselves without adding that they write for this newspaper or are the editors of this or that newspaper.
It is the season of madness and yellow journalism is on the prowl with its fangs bared. But there is some comic relief in reading these newspapers, though the risk is that you may unwittingly “un-educate” yourself.
Yellow journalism is the last resort of politicians with mischief in their minds – politicians who want power at all costs. And to such politicians, blackmail is a card game. And because the Federal and State Governments are not enforcing the newspaper registration law, many of these newspapers do not even bother to publish their addresses in order to escape being sued by those aggrieved by their articles. “We are registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission,” one such newspaper wrote in its defence when questions were raised over their non-registration with relevant bodies like the Ministry of Information and the National Library.
This was like a man claiming that his university did not need to be registered with the National Universities Commission because it is registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission as a company. Such illogic defines the times and causes our hearts to bleed. Folks who have never done anything except journalism wonder when the madness will cease and what the future holds.
The fourth estate of the realm is soon becoming the fifth columnist of the realm. And the Nigeria Union of Journalists appears to be helpless in doing anything about this. One understands that in some states (like Akwa Ibom) the State Chairman of the NUJ has decided to take the serpents by the tail and compile a register to weed out quacks. It is a bold effort, but we all still remember what the man who used to publish lies in the magazine “Topnews” said after he was sacked from the NUJ for publishing deliberate falsehood. He laughed and said he was never a member of the NUJ to begin with and he went on publishing.
Quacks do not understand registration and due process. When someone dangles a brown envelope before them, they smell blood and charge like a pack of hyenas. And when they fall on their victims they leave only bones.