When Government Owns The Newsroom, Who Owns The Truth? -By Isaac Asabor

There was a time when entering a newsroom meant entering a sanctuary of truth; a place where facts mattered more than friendships, accountability mattered more than political convenience, and the journalist’s loyalty was owed not to the man in the Government House but to the public. That ideal is increasingly under siege.

In too many state-owned media organizations, journalism has been reduced to an elaborate performance in which the script is written elsewhere, the characters are carefully selected, the villains are predetermined, and the journalist is expected to read his lines without asking inconvenient questions.

In fact, the newsroom, once a watchdog, is gradually becoming a kennel. And the tragedy is that the journalist holding the pen may have little control over what he is permitted to write.

State-owned media, in principle, should belong to the people. After all, governments do not own public broadcasting organizations in the same way individuals own private businesses. They are funded, directly or indirectly, by taxpayers. Their obligation, therefore, should be to inform citizens fairly, scrutinize government responsibly and provide credible information on matters of public interest. But somewhere along the line, ownership has been confused with control.

The consequence is a dangerous mutation: public media becomes government media, government media becomes ruling-party media, and ruling-party media eventually becomes propaganda machinery. That is where the real danger begins.

As it is at the moment, loyalty has become the qualification to work in state-owned media outfits.  One of the most damaging practices in state-owned media is the politicization of appointments.

Instead of entrusting media organizations to professionals with the experience, independence and editorial courage required to manage them, governments sometimes treat such institutions as extensions of the political reward system. The message to the newsroom becomes unmistakable: loyalty is more valuable than competence.

Once political loyalty becomes the currency for appointment, the newsroom’s editorial compass begins to malfunction. The editor who should be asking, “Is this story true?” starts asking a more dangerous question: “How will the governor react to this?” That single change in question can destroy an entire institution.

A reporter who knows that an uncomfortable story could offend a political appointee will think twice before filing it. An editor who fears losing his position will find reasons to kill it. A management team dependent on political goodwill will gradually learn the art of avoiding stories that embarrass those who control the purse. Nobody needs to issue a written order. Fear becomes the editor. Silence becomes policy. Self-censorship becomes professional survival. And this is how journalism can be executed without anyone firing a bullet.

The most effective censorship is not necessarily the one imposed through a memo. Sometimes it is the censorship a journalist imposes on himself because he has learnt what happens to colleagues who cross invisible political boundaries.

Against the backdrop of the foregoing, the journalist undeniably becomes the victim.  It is tempting to blame journalists when state-owned media fail in their responsibilities. That criticism is not entirely misplaced. Journalists are professionals and must be held to ethical standards irrespective of where they work. But it is intellectually dishonest to ignore the environment in which many of them operate.

Consider a journalist who works in an organization where management is politically appointed, editorial decisions are subject to political interference, salaries are irregular and investigative journalism receives little or no financial support. Then ask that journalist to behave like an entirely independent watchdog. That is easier said than done. A hungry journalist is still a human being.

A journalist with school fees to pay, rent to settle, children to feed and medical bills to confront is vulnerable to pressures that may not appear in any journalism ethics textbook. This is why the economic condition of journalists cannot be separated from the quality of journalism they produce.

When salaries are delayed for months and reporters are expected to chase stories without transportation, communication or investigative resources, the newsroom becomes fertile ground for ethical compromise. The infamous “brown envelope” culture does not emerge from nowhere. It thrives where institutional poverty meets personal desperation.

This does not excuse corruption. A journalist who accepts money to distort a story has violated the public trust. But institutions that deliberately or negligently keep journalists financially vulnerable should not pretend to be shocked when ethical standards begin to collapse. You cannot starve a watchdog and then complain that it has stopped barking.

Perhaps the most disturbing feature of the state-owned media ecosystem is the double standard, which in summary is the politics of selective accountability.

Private media organizations can face regulatory scrutiny, public condemnation and legal consequences when they breach professional standards. Yet state-owned media can sometimes behave as though government ownership provides a diplomatic passport against accountability. That is a dangerous assumption.

A public broadcaster should not become a political weapon simply because the government pays its bills. Its microphone belongs to the public. Its cameras belong to the public. Its journalists, ultimately, serve the public. The moment a state-owned broadcaster becomes a platform for ridiculing political opponents, suppressing embarrassing information, amplifying government achievements while burying government failures, or manufacturing favourable narratives, it ceases to perform the public-service function for which it exists. It becomes propaganda. And propaganda is not journalism wearing a different shirt. It is the opposite of journalism.

Given the backdrop of the foregoing view, it is expedient at this juncture to opine that journalism asks questions. Propaganda supplies answers. Journalism investigates power. Propaganda protects power. Journalism gives citizens the information they need to make informed judgments. Propaganda tells citizens what judgment they should make. The difference could not be clearer.

In fact, the puppeteers may win the newsroom, but they lose the audience. This is as there is another problem politicians and their media managers often fail to understand. The problem emerges when credibility cannot be commanded.

A government can compel a state broadcaster to praise it from morning until night. It can instruct presenters to celebrate every project, describe every policy as historic and portray every critic as an enemy of progress. But it cannot compel citizens to believe it. In an age of social media, satellite television, online newspapers, podcasts and citizen journalism, audiences have more avenues than ever to compare narratives and perspectives. When citizens repeatedly discover that a state broadcaster presents only one side of reality, they eventually stop regarding it as a credible source of independent information. There is, perhaps, no greater tragedy for a media organization than losing the trust of the very audience it is meant to serve. Indeed, the most devastating punishment a media organization can suffer is not criticism, but irrelevance, when people simply stop relying on it for news.

Once the audience concludes that a broadcaster merely says whatever those in power want said, the organization loses the most valuable asset any media house possesses: trust. And once trust disappears, no amount of government funding can purchase it back.

Surprisingly, particularly to those who seem not to understand the dynamics of journalism, government needs journalists it can disagree with.  This is where political leaders must demonstrate maturity.

A strong government does not need a newsroom populated by people who agree with everything it does. In fact, a government should value journalists capable of asking difficult questions because uncomfortable journalism can serve as an early-warning system. A reporter who exposes a failed public project is not necessarily an enemy of the government.

An investigation into corruption is not automatically an attack on the governor. A critical editorial is not a declaration of war. Sometimes criticism is simply criticism. And governments that understand this can actually use journalism to improve governance. A serious administration should want its media organizations to expose potholes, abandoned projects, corruption allegations, failing hospitals, dysfunctional schools and the grievances of citizens.

Given the foregoing, it is compelling to ask, “Why?”. The answer is simple. It is because government cannot see everything. The journalist can become the government’s eyes and ears among the people, but only if the journalist is permitted to report what he sees and hears. Unfortunately, the irony is that political leaders who suppress bad news often deprive themselves of the information required to correct their own mistakes. They surround themselves with praise singers until they can no longer hear reality.

At this juncture, it is expedient to opine that the newsroom must be rescued. The solution is not to abolish state-owned media. That would miss the point. The solution is to restore the meaning of public media.

Appointments must be based primarily on professional competence rather than political loyalty. Editorial independence must become more than a phrase buried in policy documents. Journalists must receive regular and decent salaries, while newsrooms must be adequately funded to conduct serious reporting. There must also be transparent editorial standards and mechanisms for protecting journalists from arbitrary political interference. Above all, public broadcasters must understand that their first responsibility is not to make government look good. It is to tell the public what is happening. If government performs well, journalism should report it. If government fails, journalism should report that too. That is not sabotage. That is the job.

A public broadcaster should be able to interview a governor and ask uncomfortable questions without the journalist fearing that his career has just been placed on the chopping block.

It should be able to investigate government spending without management receiving a midnight telephone call demanding that the story disappear. It should be able to give opposition voices reasonable access without being accused of treason. Anything less is not public broadcasting. It is political broadcasting masquerading as public service.

This argument may sound deliberately provocative, particularly when governments that own media organizations are perceive to be the puppeteers of the press. But perhaps provocation is necessary because what is at stake is not merely the welfare of journalists. It is democracy itself. Democracy cannot survive on citizens receiving carefully manufactured information.

When public media become government megaphones, citizens lose access to the independent scrutiny required to judge those in power. When journalists become afraid to report inconvenient truths, corruption becomes easier to conceal. When editors begin to measure stories by their political consequences rather than their public-interest value, journalism loses its soul.

And when journalism loses its soul, democracy loses one of its most important safeguards. The real tragedy is that the journalists themselves may become casualties of the system.

They enter the profession wanting to investigate, question and inform. They may eventually discover that the most dangerous story is not the one they published. It is the one they were ordered not to publish. That is how journalism is executed. Not necessarily through dismissal. Not necessarily through censorship.

Sometimes, it is executed one suppressed story at a time, one intimidated editor at a time, one hungry reporter at a time, until an entire newsroom forgets what it was created to do. The greatest danger, therefore, is not that governments own media organizations. It is that governments may forget why public media exist in the first place.

In fact, the newsroom is not a throne room. The journalist is not a courtier. And the microphone is not a political loudspeaker. It belongs to the public.

If state-owned media must survive as credible institutions, governments must stop treating them as instruments of political patronage and start treating them as what they ought to be: public institutions whose first loyalty is to truth, accountability and the citizens who ultimately pay for them.