“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness but the darkness can neither comprehend nor extinguish it”. Anyone familiar with the Christian scriptures will easily recognize these startling and amazing words of St John’s gospel. The great evangelist and Bible teacher, Dr E.W Kenyon, who died in 1948, but whose teachings and spiritual insights are as pertinent and relevant as ever, points out that in the book of Genesis, God brought about creation through words so that what is seen was made out of what is not seen. God spoke ‘Let there be’ and galaxies were flung out into the limitless reaches of space, oceans, mountains, vegetation, the animal world and ultimately man himself was created. Was God then not the first, even if divine, journalist? For, the primary tool of the journalist is the spoken or written word. With words the journalist can create but with words he can also destroy. With words the journalist can nurture love and with words he can also instigate the worst and most pernicious forms of fanaticism and hatred. With words the journalist can make heroes out of villains and vice versa. But the Word of God is different. Inviolable integrity is its foundation. Somewhere in the psalms, it says that God has elevated His Word above His throne.
With the revolutionary innovations of our contemporary world, the profession of journalism has undoubtedly undergone a sea change. No longer is the terrain left to the domination of conventional media outlets such as newspapers, magazines, radio or television. Now these traditional mediums have to contend and fiercely too with the internet, online platforms, blogs, Face book, twitter, text messages, You Tube and other modern means of communication. Many see this as a positive development. The ordinary citizen has been liberated, they contend, from the authoritarian tendencies of the traditional media which determine what is news or not; what material to publish, broadcast or censor. Indeed, this development is the focus of the slim but powerful book by ace Journalist and now Executive Commissioner at the National Communications Commission (NCC), Mr. Sunday Dare, titled ‘We are all journalists now’. Millions of ordinary citizens no longer have to wait on the conventional media to be served the news. Rather, through their hand phones, they can record images instantly and post online; they can send text messages, they can disseminate instant news on twitter. This is what Dare calls ‘Citizen Journalism’.
While the ‘democratization’ of the media space may be a salutary development, it has also come at a great cost. For the professional checks and balances that inhibit and constrain the traditional media is absent in the ferocious jungle that the social media can be. In the traditional media, facts are sacred even if comments are free. Again, the traditional media tend to be mindful of litigations for defamation or libel while the social media operatives, except in a few respectable instances function under a cloak of anonymity. But then, does it not take more than access to face book, twitter, mobile phone cameras or text messages to be a journalist? Does it not require adherence to a strict code of ethics, a commitment to a certain degree of professional integrity?
Let us take the recent experience of Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, as an example. Speaking to a private group of students, Soyinka had said that he would discard his green card if Donald Trump won the last US presidential election. Eventually, Trump did win and the social media militants descended on the Nobel Laureate with ferocious glee urging him to immediately dispense with his green card. This was clearly a most egregious intrusion on an individual’s privacy. But then, you can trust our own W.S. He gave it back to his critics in more than full measure falling back on his inexhaustible reserves of mental resources.
Another case has just been brought to my attention involving the respected political economist, Professor John Moyibi Amoda , former Military Administrator of Lagos State, Brigadier-General Buba Marwa and one Dr Taiyemiwo Ogunade. It is a vivid example of how social media outlets can be manipulated to tarnish and annihilate reputations, not necessarily out of deliberate mischief but due to non-adherence to the rigorous professional standards the practice of journalism requires. As the narrative goes, on Tuesday, June 9, 2009, Dr Taiyemiwo Ogunade granted an interview to a respected social media platform making grave allegations against both Professor Amoda and General Marwa. Claiming to be a staff of the City University of New York (CUNY), where Professor Amoda was Chairperson of the Department of Black Studies at the time, Ogunade alleged that Marwa when he was Nigeria’s Military Attache to the United Nations (UN), entered into a deal with CUNY for the establishment of a postgraduate degree in Peace and Conflict Resolution for which he gave the institution $30 million. It is curious that the same 2009 interview has been repeated verbatim in 2016 despite earlier vigorous and vehement debunking of Ogunade’s claims by both Amoda and Marwa.
Ogunade claims that Professor Amoda was desperate for the college to take the money but because of his staunch opposition to the deal, CUNY was forced to return the money to Marwa and that the money was never returned to the Nigerian treasury but was rather shared between Marwa and Abacha. Ogunade alleged that the CUNY sacked him from its staff because of his principled and unbending stance on the matter. Professor Amoda insists, however, that Ogunade was never a bona fide member of the university’s faculty and so could not have been sacked by CUNY. Moreover, he avers that CUNY never received any funds from Marwa and these facts could easily have been cross checked from the university before the publication of Ogunade’s interview. Beyond these, Professor Amoda affirms that he never met Marwa either at CUNY or anywhere else. It is instructive that Professor Amoda retired from CUNY as Emeritus Professor of Political Science.
The reality, Professor Amoda explains, is that between 1996 and 1997, the City University of New York decided on the creation of new and pioneering programmes at the university level and called for proposals that could be funded and developed as University wide programmes. Professor Amoda’s proposal on Peace Building and Peace Making was adjudged as one of the eight best and thus approved by the institution. According to CUNY’s Office of University Relations, “At City College, Professor John Moyibi Amoda, and colleagues won funding for their proposed interdisciplinary BA/MA Honours Programme in UN-related Peace Building and Peace Making statecraft. CUNY faculty and United Nations Secretariat Personnel will work to develop courses in such areas as conflict anticipation, conflict prevention, risk assessment and mitigation and post-conflict peace keeping”.
Amoda was also involved in developing Nigeria’s International Training Institute for Peace (ITIP), an affiliate of the UN and the then Organization of African Unity. Towards actualizing this objective, he worked closely with the National War College which had Major General Chris Abutu as its Executive Head. To facilitate his functioning diplomatically as the inaugural Director General of ITIP, he was appointed Ambassador-In –Residence attached to the National War College, an appointment for which he reportedly received no emoluments either from the War College or any other agency of government.
Dr Ogunade’s interview was the basis for another sensational story on one of WhatsApp chat lines with the headline “30 years after, the long awaited confirmation about Dele Giwa’s death”. Without the slightest scintilla of evidence, Ogunade sought to link Marwa with the parcel bombing of Dele Giwa. Surely, serious and rigorous background checks ought to have been carried out before the publication of such a story. As Sunday Dare notes in his book on citizen journalism “While citizen journalism can challenge the mainstream media to be more transparent, innovative and investigative, the former can learn from the traditional media’s better gate keeping, factual checking and more matured news presentation”.
Let us conclude with a quote by Hunter S. Thompson, which underscores the critical importance of journalism and why it is not a profession that can be treated with levity; why credible journalism matters. In his words: “if we cannot produce a generation of journalists –or even a good handful – who care enough about our world and our future to make journalism the great literature it can be, then “professionally oriented programmes” are a waste of time. Without at least a hard core of articulate men, convinced that journalism today is perhaps the best means of interpreting and thereby preserving what little progress we have made toward freedom and self-respect over the years, without that tough-minded elite in our press, dedicated to concepts that are sensed and quietly understood, rather than learned in schools – without these men, we might as well toss in the towel and admit that ours is a society too interested in comic strips and TV to consider revolution until it bangs on our front door in the dead of some quiet night when our guard is finally down and we no longer kid ourselves about being bearers of a great and decent dream”.
It is certainly not for nothing that the 1999 constitution in Section 22 of chapter two explicitly states that the obligation of the mass media is to “uphold the fundamental objectives contained in this Chapter and uphold the responsibility and accountability of the Government to the people”. This onerous responsibility calls for the highest standards of credibility and integrity on the part of both the mainstream and emergent social media.
