Free, But Suffocated, Media – Time for Collective Action in Demanding Justice

New Democrat (Monrovia)

12 May 2011

editorial

Liberia’s media environment, dating from the claws of an intolerant and brutish military junta in the 1980s to an equally intolerant and even more ruthless regime born out of the wombs of an atrocious rebel war, has transformed on the surface, but the foundations for building an independent and probing media remain fragile, if not dangerous.

The military junta lacked the finesse and the sophistication in selling itself as a redeeming political force.

The warlords’ finesse, on the other hand, was lost in their excessive greed and ruthlessness that made them number one enemy not necessarily of their hungry and misinformed people, but of more powerful enemies in what is now a global village.

In the end, against the pens of freedom and accountability, these naïve men and women lost with terrible consequences not only for themselves and their followers, but also for the people as a whole.

The signposts are up again, using different and not so difficult to fathom tactics.

The situation now is different, with finesse applied so convincingly that some have concluded the issues of basic press freedom along with other human rights disappeared with Samuel K. Doe and his junta.

How regrettable! This is a blind and opportunistic appraisal of the issues, for the issues that necessitated the rise and fall of the junta remain pretty much alive and are multiplying around poverty alleviation, accountability and transparency and good governance.

The media, informed and independent, can play its role in accentuating these issues.

But the dubious strategy of ensuring that the media remains an appendage of politicians have changed from arrest and imprisonment, to the state using its heavy economic axe on those media entities that dare to be different while rewarding the praise singers of perpetual doom.

Since 2006, the landscape has been created to financially reward plain and supporting media outlets, with reports that some editors and publishers are hired ‘media consultants’ to top government officials. The consultant serves his or her client without emphasis on independence.

But this is not all. The media and publication budgets of some ministries and agencies run in the hundreds of thousands of US dollars, combined, in the millions. Yet, by design, even the meager amounts they owe some newspapers are withheld, in some cases up to a year. This, definitely, is to ensure collapse in the face of rising costs of printing and other materials needed to remain viable.

The other aspect of the current strategy is the establishment of alternative media outlets under the guise that these are private when the fact is that they are bankrolled via taxpayers’ money and state resources to sing songs of doom that they hardly understand. In many so obvious cases, the government prefers its patronage advertisement for these media outlets, all under the foolhardy notion that it is winning hearts and minds in a delusional campaign. It is not. It is only delaying the obvious that its predecessors could not escape, for no volume of praise-singing articles or airtime interviews can conceal reality. The best public relations is to do the right thing.

The problem of the media presenting a united front to demand justice as taxpayers and employers is the overwhelming numbers of behind-the-curtain state financed media outlets and executives. But if the media are to be respected and treated fairly, some form of collective action is required now. Means of carving collective actions and implementing them are underway, so that the government and its functionaries can be made to realize that they are doing no one a favour when they select to take pages for publishing long, windy and unreadable self-serving speeches.

We demand justice, and we intend to get it through collective action. We cannot fail.

AllAfrica – All the Time