YOU CANNOT FIGHT MEDIA AND WIN- IT’S LIKE FIGHTING GHOSTS

….the journalist in me speaks

I repeat: No political leader can fight media and win!

It has never happened and never will.

One of the most visible signs of leadership failure is manifested when a leader attempts to divert public opinion from poor performance by waging a campaign of haunting the press, hounding journalists, intimidating individual media practitioners and creating a pervasive atmosphere of fear of persecution among media houses.

Confident leaders are tolerant performers who uphold the popular saying:

“Your value does not decrease based on someone’s inability to see your worth”.

In the world today, we are increasingly seeing leaders who decimate their political fortunes and mutilate their otherwise admirable persona by resorting to intolerant over-reactions to media reports. At times, a non-story builds into an inexplicable national whoop-de-do because a government whoops up the hullabaloo by taking drastic measures in an effort to punish. What happens is that such non-stories which would have earned the dismissal and contempt of the public become immensely topical with everyone wondering why there was such a brouhaha.

The public, when not interfered with, when left to the wonderful chemistry of freedom of expression and an atmosphere of tolerance, become ruthless judges and critics of media; not to mention the public’s consumer capacity to spontaneously isolate or banish an offending/disrespectful journalist from their repertoire. Media houses live in perpetual fear of triggering this public spontaneity to punish them, but when governments come in, the offending articles and the journalists behind them enjoy public empathy. The best advice to government is: as much as possible, please try not attempt to manage press freedom and media practice. When the public observes some semblance of management of news and media reports intended for the general public, the public’s natural gate-keeping capacity is turned into either full scale hostility to leadership or derision and distrust.

Media cannot hold leadership in disrespect or derision and still win consensual public approval. Unfortunately, politicians tend to treat the public as a homogeneous entity. The public is called public because of its generality, its communal essence, its free-to-all accessibility and its diverse constitution. When leadership attempts to interfere with media on behalf of the public, more often than not a government stirs hostility and mistrust. The public is best left to debate the merits and demerits of a non-criminal story line from a moral perspective, and in its spontaneity the public has been known to deliver a hard verdict of ‘guilty’ on offending journalists. Under such circumstances, the media, who are business entities lose the clientele amazingly fast and with dire effects on circulation, listenership and of course, revenue.

BUT that works out neatly only when there is no undue interference by the Goliath hand of governance.

To diminish the sting of criticism by media, a wronged but strategic government will, in the main:

-         -  issue a statement of fact to correct the errors in an article

-          - maintain utterances of its firm stand and commitment to freedom of expression and

-         - express the inalienable rights of individuals and organisation therein mentioned, to seek recourse to the courts for justice on grounds of slander and or libel.

That automatically depicts a government as much of a victim of the discomforts of democracy and freedom of expression, as everyone else; it depicts a government’s reluctance to use too much might to spite an instrument of freedom of expression; it draws public sympathy and empathy- in the process, a government wins over the respect and trust of the public.

If, however, a government has delusions of grandeur and wants to depict itself as Goliath, it will resort to a war path immediately. The consequences are generally disappointing to the general public because hard-handedness can never be an admirable trait in a leadership cadre that is already armed to the teeth by a plethora of laws guaranteed in the constitution.

Powers that are lawfully afforded governments exist to guard against abuse and offence but need not be used to the utmost all the time.

The most powerful instrument in defusing a public spat with media is to use media to discredit the medium that appears in the wrong. The platitude of making a mountain out of a molehill is as astute today as when it was first coined centuries ago.

Governments must walk tall mainly to be seen delivering services, than issuing retribution!

That’s the case for media and freedom of expression.

Andrew Sesinyi

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