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Press freedom & the bearded goat
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THE journalist is a hunter. He goes after human rats and grasscutters personified, matters about whom he can salt and spice and present as news. The fatter and juicier the catch, the better, because sensation is essentially our cup of tea.
Our job is to sell news and sell it in grand style.
Because the journalist is a hunter and is created with a special kind of nose for sniffing out news, he is usually not welcome in many places. He is seen as someone who has been born to make people uncomfortable.
The problem is that some people don’t want things written about them even if it is promotional and favourable. When it entails publishing their pictures alongside the story, they are doubly scared.
“Please, don’t use my picture. People will think I’ve got money and come for loan,” someone told me.
Anyhow, journalists are seen as intruders, undesirables, born with plenty of okro in the mouth; maybe some also in the nose. Some of my friends are no longer too close because they fear I’d give them full coverage in the Sikaman Palava column. Ha ha ha! What a funny world!
Well, people like my Uncle, Sir Kofi Jogolo, my former classmate and born-mathematician, Kwame Korkorti, and ex-football star cum human-salamander Kofi Kokotako don’t mind featuring in the hilarious inches of this column. Kofi Owuo alias Death By Poverty is one personality who has to be mentioned in this palaver.
These are people who are going to live long, primarily because they see the world as one big ball of fun. When Kwame Korkorti was told that his dear mother was dead at home, he smiled and asked the bearer of the message whether his mother had cooked the afternoon meal before claiming she was dead. Until her death, Korkorti ate his lunch at his mother’s end.
When my Uncle Kofi Jogolo was picked and lost 1,500 dollars and a good amount of Sikaman currency, he didn’t lament the loss. Instead he was amused. In fact, he was almost glad about it, because he grinned from ear to ear, stroked his delicate moustache and congratulated the thief, adding that “He is smarter than I am.” Yeah, Jogolo is the man who employs a Swedish barber to trim his moustache.
And when Kofi Kokotako was unemployed and was nearly hit by an articulated truck, he called the driver a fool. “The idiot should have killed me,” he said to me. “Didn’t he know I was unemployed and suffering?”
Today, Kokotako is employed as a Reverend and is not doing badly at all. Thanks to the regular silver collection.
And what about Kofi Owuo, the celebrated poor man. His wife left him not because he was poor, but because he swore in front of her that he would never prosper.
The following dawn the wife packed bag and baggage and went back to her parents and told them all about her husband’s alliance with poverty. Her parents were bewildered and called the alliance unholy. They had no option than to send back Owuo’s drinks to end the marriage.
Kofi Owuo alias Death By Poverty did not contest the issue. He was more engrossed thinking about how to become poorer than to contest what he called a frivolous matter. The wife could go to hell, he said. These are people longevity smiles upon. Nothing worries them.
Getting back to talking about journalists. I’d say that anywhere there is journalism, the issue of press freedom is not too far away. Is the press free? That’s one question foreigners want answer to when they are on visit.
Well, journalists celebrate a yearly WORLD PRESS FREEDOM DAY to drum home the idea of press freedom as a very important thing in the practice of journalism.
This year’s was celebrated almost a fortnight ago but people didn’t see much of us because we are normally not good celebrants. We should have mounted a float to roam the entire capital, dancing asaboni to brass band music just like PTC did recently.
Although journalists are known to be very good dancers because they walk very much, on that day, they were all busy writing. It was the Minister of Information, Mr Kofi Totobi Quakyi who saved the day by addressing a forum organised to mark the day.
He is a man I’ve always admired since his radical university days. He spoke much on press freedom, cautioning the press not to abuse the freedom granted by the Fourth Republican constitution, but to use it for the progress of society.
Well, press freedom has been defined by many journalists as the freedom to ‘write nonsense’. This definition is not quite accurate. I asked one staff reporter to define press freedom. It took him fifteen minutes to put up something.
“Press freedom is the freedom that is enjoyed by the press that enables journalists to publish or broadcast any kind of material so long as it is absolutely true, is not libelous and slanderous, and is not against the national interest.”
I gave him eight out of 10, a straight A. I guess every journalist is old enough to know that certain things he or she writes is for or against the national interest. We certainly must guard against writing against the national interest; that is very important.
There is also the question of criticising government. The government can be criticized, so long as the criticisms are genuine and the President and his ministers are not insulted and called names. Let us criticize, but let us do it decently so that the journalistic profession can be revered, and its nobility acknowledged. We are not war mongers, are we?
One area in which journalists are not spoken well of is the complaint that they misquote people. Journalists sometimes misquote people, but in four out of five complaints it turns out that nobody is misquoted after all.
When we interview people they say things unreservedly and we publish unreservedly. When the publication is out and their friends or superiors read it and accuse them of having said too much to the press, then they start claiming they were misquoted.
We have encountered these ‘misquotation palaver’ every now and then and reporters are usually accused of this transgression. However, when they bring out their note-books or recorders, it is realised that they wrote nothing out of the way. “Book no lie”.
My advice to people who deal with the press is that if they do not want anything written, they shouldn’t say it. What they want to say is OFF-RECORD, then of course, there is no reason to say it. When you say it, you’re taking a risk. In that instance, you can’t also claim to have been misquoted or words put into your mouth.
And it isn’t every journalist who would be circumspect in matters that are supposed to be off-record, because journalists often want to be as sensational as possible to make their stories saleable. So say just what you want to see published and you won’t later regret it and claim you were misquoted.
Well, I’m not holding brief for journalists, because a few of us are notorious for colouring our reports sometimes sand-papering the words so much that they look very bright in front of readers.
As I once said, when the police tells one such notorious pressman that the thief stole a brown goat, the pressman would want to know whether the goat was bearded. Of course, the police would say ‘Yes’.
However, in the press report, it appears, “A gang of notorious goat-thieves were apprehended in the early hours of yesterday. In the car in which they were riding was a brownish-red goat having a long beard. Upon further examination, it was realised that the goat also had a greyish moustache.”
When the story appears, the police are naturally disturbed. A single thief turns out to be a gang of thieves. The goat also becomes a chameleon and changes colour to brownish-red. And a moustacheless goat overnight wears a greyish moustache whether you like it or not. Luckily the journalist does not add that the moustache was trimmed by a Swedish barber.
Yes, we have a few of such mischief-creating, chronically notorious journalists. But they are one in a hundred. In any case, we make the world. And we shall always do our best to make it a happy place to live in.
This article was first publish on Saturday, May, 20, 1995
There is a scripture that is found in Matthew 6:22 which says that the lamp of the body is the eye and therefore the eye must see well to enable the body to get to its destination.
What most people do not know is that behind the scenes, there is a strong interaction between the eyes and the brain before a picture becomes clear. The state of mind therefore is crucial to the eye seeing clearly to enable the body to process accurately the information the eyes are feeding it for proper identification of what the eyes see.
This is similar to how a person behaves i.e. what informs the decisions that forms in the mind that results in the actions that a person performs. The actions of a person does not therefore just happen but is as a result of things that went on in the mind, which in most cases resulted from information passed on to it by the eyes either consciously or unconsciously.
There are so many issues that affect our society which makes one wonder, whether the people who displayed such acts were created by someone or something other than God.
How can a person see a beach created by God with beautiful beaches and fresh air blowing all around, decides to defecate at such places, and therefore desecrate the environment? lt is simply mind boggling?
When other people in other countries who dwell on the coast are using their beaches for tourist attraction purposes as a means of livelihood and also to promote environmental health, some people living around our beaches, have turned them into rubbish dumping sites and toilets.
It is a very sad situation and the earlier we did something about it the better. It is a national emergency that must engage the attention, first of the government and then the citizenry, where religious bodies and NGOs must play a critical role.
The things we focus on in this country, needs to be addressed. Our minds which processes the info the eyes send to the brain, must be disciplined. There are certain behaviours that a disciplined mind can ignore even when the eye has provided info to the brain. One of the things a disciplined mind does, is the avoidance of a second look, which is critical for every person who wants to avoid adultery or fornication.
Once a person is not blind, he will see things. The boobs, the ‘shankus’, the coca cola shapes, the light complexioned, the dark complexioned etc. the eyes will definitely see and report same to the brain. What the brain or the mind decides to do or instructs the eye to do is the issue.
It can decide to instruct the eye to take a second look and let the mind drool over it or say ignore it and that will be the end.
If the mind becomes trained to focus on environmental issues like clean environment, the eyes will automatically be reporting on insanitary conditions to the brain as and when it sees them. The mind will pay attention to such data and begin to process them and to identify solutions to deal with the reported insanitary conditions.
There is the need to encourage citizens to train the mind to focus on the right thing so that in tandem with the eyes, focus will be maintained. When the mind is so trained, it communicates with the eye to also focus on hood things that helps in both are spiritual life and our secular lives, for indeed the eyes are the lamp of the body. God bless.
THE relationship between New Times Corporation (NTC) and African Concrete Productions (ACP) is based entirely on matters of the stomach. Each depends on the other in a dietary symbiosis, reinforced by the close proximity of each other
At lunchtime, you’d see a particular set of Times workers marching regimentally to ACP to face the wall. You’d think they are soldiers. It has long been declared that the company manufactures the best kokonte in the Greater Accra Region. ACP is, therefore, a culinary haven for those NTC kokonte fans, both male and female.
As the NTC kokonte warriors cross the border to ACP, you’d see some ACP banku fanatics dancing joyously to NTC. They are lucky folks because they do not have to obtain visa to enter into ‘Times’ to attack the balls of banku with precision and accuracy. They also claim that the lightsoup at ‘Times’ is arguably the best in West Africa.
So the relationship between the two entities was quite cordial and based practically on stomach palaver, until ACP workers staged an industrial revolution, whereupon the managing director, accountant and estate manager were allegedly stripped naked and locked up in a room. An insurgency had began in earnest.
An ACP worker came to ‘Times’, this time not to eat banku and okro. He had come to inform newsmen that juicy stuff awaited them at ACP. It could make a front page lead story.
A camerawoman and a female reporter were accordingly dispatched to go and bring back news, juicy news as juicy as kokonte and groundnut soup.
I was driving to work when I espied the familiar camerawoman clicking away outside the ACP premises. I didn’t see any ‘Times’ reporter but angry workers who were on the verge of getting violent. I slowed down and the driver behind blew his horn at me like a lunatic. I drove on.
Later, I heard the reporter and camerawoman were harassed and brutalised. The report came,. “The camerawoman, Mrs Salome Adonu-Agbottah and reporter Mrs Doreen Allotey, in an attempt to retrieve the camera which the workers had seized from them were severely beaten. They were manhandled and almost pushed into a big gutter opposite the company’s premises.
BRUISES
“….The camerawoman had bruises on her body, her hand bag was destroyed and the money in it stolen. Mrs Allotey’s watch was also snatched and her feet stamped on.”
Luckily, it was not her nose that was trampled upon. She has a beautiful nose.
The bad news was received with extreme sorrow. If the victims had been men, it would not have seemed too bad. But to brutalise women is just unacceptable. The New Times Corporation has not stopped mourning the incident which has been condemned in many circles.
Some people keep asking me why Times sent females to cover a potentially violent demonstration. I tell them they might as well ask why CNN’s amazon, Christina Amanpour, is assigned to cover the carnage in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda. She is always on the frontline in jeans and jacket.
Journalism is a potentially hazardous profession, and once you accept to study and practise the trade, you might as well bone up to face any assignment as long as your superiors feel you are capable of handling it or you have demonstrated the capacity to handle it. Both males and females can be assigned anywhere, anytime just like policemen and women are assigned.
The only difference between cops and pressmen is that the latter are armed only with a pen and the former with a gun. The question is should newsmen also arm themselves so that in any event of an assault they would not be found wanting in self-defence? They can’t adequately defend themselves with a pen and a jotter. A pen cannot even disfigure an opponent’s upper lip.
Photo-journalists have particularly suffered violence. Spectator ace-cameraman Vincent Dzatse was severely assaulted by AMA men when he attempted to take pictures of their indiscretions.
Sports cameraman, P. K. Arthur has been beaten more than once at the sports stadium when riots errupted and he wanted to capture it on his lenses.
Some sports journalists have been banned from entering the Accra Sports Stadium by supporters because in their comments, they didn’t write “sense”. Some supporters once nearly lynched Christian Abbew, Spectator Sports Editor, near a courtroom. He was stoned like the biblical Stephen. He had gone to defend a contempt charge.
I think it is time journalists met and discussed how best to defend themselves in any event of an attack by individuals or mobs. In the pursuance of their duty, they must be free from harassment and assault.
Some journalists go to work and return home with a black-eye or a double fore-head. It is just not right. Something has to be done about it. I think journalists should be armed. But first we must be trained in the use of firearms so that our warning shot do not hit below the belt. What about training in Kung Fu?
This article was first published on Saturday, October 17, 1998.
