If you always dive into the sewers, how do you soar to the skies, to help raise public discourse, lift policy and ensure good governance?
How do you rise to dizzying heights, in terms of winning ideas, if your thinking is fixated on Lilliput — remember Lilliput, the fictional place of the puny race, in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver Travels?
A president announced a line of official reportage, via the chief of staff and the secretary to the government of the federation (SGF), and the media goes ga-ga with sterile controversy! Is the trite even beyond the ken of the most vocal in the public space?
A new minister, in self-deprecatory banter to the top echelon of his ministry, jokes he knows little about his new posting, and a newspaper turns it to be hot news, followed by impassioned debates, about square pegs in round holes, as that cliche goes!
Even if some members of the public can’t quite read between the lines, must the media also serve news outside its context, to drive banal controversies, and, for commerce, mislead their readers?
What President Muhammadu Buhari said about ministers going through the chief of staff; and the SGF coordinating policy, cabinet, inter-ministry, agencies and departmental affairs is trite. Yet it elicited thunderous debate, especially by the political opposition, which seems to have run out of gas, except when clutching to mischief, no matter how absurd.
As to serving the comment by Rauf Aregbesola, new minister of the Interior, out of context, the media lobby that plagued his Osun governorship with deliberate bad press appears to have fired their first shot, to welcome him to his new beat.
Still, doesn’t ethics in reportage hold anything for today’s media? Is clear abuse of media space, by the deliberate skew of stories, which borders on media terrorism, now the norm?
Clearly, such empty sensationalism is not sustainable. It is the biblical wide and merry way that leads to perdition. Any medium that travels that route only chisels away at its own credibility, until it becomes completely nude, with all the shame public nudity brings. But beyond individual self-destruction by some media, it also chisels away at the believability of the industry, and a dip, in its collective confidence level, in the market.
If sales and readership of newspapers are constricting by the day, at least you know one of the reasons.
But beyond market suicide, how can the media raise the level of public discourse, if all its leading lights do is feed on empty and banal controversies?
If the media yells and screams and hoots about low-quality governance, how can it be a solution and cure, if its own pastime is low-quality reportage, that fuels low quality controversies?
For any society desiring progress and advancement, banality should be a no-no. But that seems completely lost on all, in this season of banality and more banality.
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