Anglophone Africa: journalists–puppets of the proprietors

Abstract

The firing in June 1998 of Kwendo Opanga, one of Kenya's most respected political columnists, for allegedly accepting bribes from President Daniel arap Moi's ruling party, the Kenya African National Union (KANU), triggered a lively public debate on the issue of journalistic ethics in Anglophone Africa. The debate was conducted in "Expression Today." [ A journal about democracy, human rights and the media in Kenya, published by the Media Institute and distributed to all important journalists and journalism scholars through out Anglophone Africa.] For well over a period of two years before Kwendo Opanga lost his job, however, serious discussions on journalistic ethics had been going on at the United States International University - Africa and the main points discussed concerned freedom of the press, independence, impartiality, fair play, decency, accuracy and responsibility.

The fact that such a senior editor could be caught with his pants down on ethical issues simply meant there was a need for ALL journalists in Africa to be reminded of the basic principles of journalistic ethics. As practising journalists from a number of English speaking African countries were discussing various journalistic ethical principles, several African governments, including those of Kenya and Uganda, were in a process of formulating specific codes of ethics for journalists which by and large would include the seven aspects journalists were discussing in Nairobi.

There are many ethics related scandals involving top journalists in English speaking African countries that one hears about all the time but never reads about in the papers. The range of ethical problems encountered by media reporters in most of these countries is somewhat startling. They include conflicts of interest, freebies, junkets, intellectual theft, deception, carelessness, kowtowing to advertisers and politicians, use of dubious evidence and outright bias. It is striking how often Kenyan and indeed

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most African journalists fail to live up to the high standards they often prescribe for everyone else in their respective societies.

While discussing independence as an ethical principle journalists from Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, The Gambia and Sudan who attended most of the workshops organised by the University agreed that for a newspaper, TV or radio station to be really independent it had to be free from governmental, commercial and proprietorial interference in editorial decision making.

In examining the impact of proprietors on news processing and coverage, I have had to depend mostly on more than 35 years of experience of well over 300 journalists who attended the workshops, which were conducted under my guidance as the journalism programme coordinator of the University.