•Mutations of the journalist in the corridors of power
A notable politician/public officer dismisses fear of backlash over his persistent rape and impregnation of minors. He brags to a friend in Diaspora, in his native dialect translatable thus: “The news is dead on delivery. I have top journalists at my beck and call.” He bragged that he has journalism’s shining lights on a leash of cash. As the mongrel dares extremities for a gift of bone, so do his ‘boys’ in the media, he claimed.
Predictably, the most senior media aide in the culprit’s pack of hounds spread the cash and killed news of his sex crimes.
It is only fair that the aide watches helplessly as randy, power-drunk politicians rape his daughters and infect them with gonorrhea, like his principal’s underage victims; by Edumare’s retributive grace. It is only just that Edumare situates the fruit of his loins in similar circumstances, without the luxury of justice. That he might understand agonies of his principal’s victims and their families.
The media aide is neither conflicted nor appalled. He says: “Na today e dey happen?” (It’s no oddity. It happens). A passion for truth and ethics could never spur him to imperil his job – which he considers a saving grace, his ‘out’ from bleak, thankless Journalism.
The life of a journalist-turned-media-aide is a parody in which honour plays no part. Unlike other members of his principal’s court, he enjoys no prideful place. He sits on his haunch, like a dog on its paws outside its master’s court. Like the hound, he is forever waiting to lunge, with a kill-cry and bare fangs, at perceived ‘detractors’ of his principal, the dog owner.
‘Ki lo ma nse awon boys yii naa?’ (What’s wrong with these boys?), he drones irritably, whenever his former colleagues in the media, subject his principal to harsh scrutiny and objective criticism. He assures his principal – who could be the president, senate president, a state governor, legislative speaker or local government chairman – that the press can be bought over.
Media aides wrongly assume every news editor, correspondent and reporter to be manipulable by cash, a foreign trip, a gallon of vegetable oil, Christmas/Ileya ram or a bag of rice, items by which his conscience was sold and bought.
Thus he gets a generous budget to silence the ‘boys’ and inspire them to ignore the ineptitude and corruption of his principal. Of the bribe allotment, the media aide siphons 70 per cent to his personal account, and splits the remainder among the ‘boys.’
It never gets old to see the so-called ‘press boys’ scurry for residue of the bribe with dark delight. Rebels against the prevalent rot are daubed unfairly aggressive, biased, sanctimonious or driven by questionable animosity because they have been ‘left out.’
There is a difference between ‘press boys’ and ‘Gentlemen of the Press.’ The press boy forever prowls, lobbying along the corridors of power in frantic quest to become media aide. A ‘Gentleman of the Press’ however, is a true ethical native. And he exists.
He understands that the work of a media aide connotes the soul’s struggle against the body. Thus he rejects the role, knowing that as media aide, he would suffer the affliction of languid ethics, insatiable lusts and poisonous glamour, like a courtesan haunted in post-orgasmic flush, by relentless spasms of lust for riches and unearned pleasure. Like fabled Tantalus, his thirst is never quenched.
Media aides get confused too. Mcenteer calls this condition occupational hazard for those who move from journalism into government, or vice versa. They experience confusion about the role and functions on their new jobs, likewise their colleagues and news audience, seeking information from or about them, their professionalism and evolving identities.
Reuben Abati for instance, was a notable, venerated critic, celebrated at home and abroad. Yet he suffered irredeemable descent as justifier of ineptitude and political trifles as ex-President Goodluck Jonathan’s Special Adviser on Media Affairs (SAMA).
Enter Femi Adesina, SAMA to President Muhammadu Buhari. Adesina’s performance as presidential media aide further diminishes the worth of the journalist in the corridors of power. Although his apologists within and outside media circuits justify his indiscretions claiming, “What’s he supposed to do? Would you quit if it were you?”
Nobody is asking Adesina to quit. Yet it is instructive that a man who used to be a journalist of immense wisdom and worth, at least to those inspired by him, has been reduced to whatever he is currently.
Adesina’s difficulties vary in character and severity but are classifiable as problems of ethics, irony, conflict, confusion and blur. What if he had vied for the presidency? This couldn’t be preposterous given his once luscious reputation as a thought moulder, manager of men and resources. Sadly, like his predecessors and several lesser aides, he manifested as glowing work of self-sculpture, until his descent into the labyrinth of power, as presidential statuette and every gadfly’s unfinished model.
Similar ethical dilemma afflict journalists across the seas. Charles Royer suffered unpleasant, public, irony at his election to Seattle City Hall. Before he became American Mayor, Royer attained fame for his nightly 60 to 90-second political commentaries on KING-TV. In 1976, his half-hour documentary, “The Bucks Stop Here,” exposed improper use of special-interest money in the state legislature.
The programme earned him two national journalism awards. When he became Mayor in 1977, Royer decided to share valuable information with his former press colleagues in off-the-record sessions. But TV crews wanted to bring their cameras into the meetings, against his wishes. Royer eventually showed up on TV and newspaper front pages, shoving TV cameras out. He will forever remember the headline with the photo: “TV Commentator turned Mayor shuts out TV.”
Another poignant example is Edward R. Murrow, respected radio and TV journalist’s alleged bid to prevent the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) from airing “Harvest of Shame” soon after he became the head of United States Information Agency. It was one of Murrow’s final documentaries for the CBS network and it revealed the terrible living and working conditions of migrant farm laborers in Florida.
His attempt however, failed, but leaked to the press thus embarrassing the novice bureaucrat. “Murrow, the government propaganda chief, had tried to censor Murrow, the muckraking journalist,” notes Mcenteer.
Despite their shortcomings Royer and Murrow served in more ennobling circumstances. Not as glorified errand boys or attack hounds. It is the job of journalist turned media aides to pitilessly offer harsh but constructive criticisms from patriotic and envisaged media perspective, of their principals’ intended policies or actions before they are made public.
If it is their principals’ wish to transform Nigeria, media aides should help them understand that in heaven, saints don’t become ‘God’ and an angel is nobody in particular.
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