Maravi

True reasons for govt’s desire to regulate the media

True reasons for govt’s desire to regulate the media
By Editor
Sat 12 Dec. 2009, 04:00 CAT

If things were left to the likes of Ronnie Shikapwasha and others in Rupiah Banda’s government, The Post wouldn’t be here today. It is clear that there is a campaign by Rupiah’s government to try and annihilate The Post. And all these media regulation schemes they are coming up with are targeted primarily at The Post.

And Ronnie made it clear on ZNBC National Watch programme on Wednesday night when he said that the government wants to regulate the media because it does not want the 2011 campaigns to be destroyed by one media organisation.

It requires little intelligent – if a little is all one has – to realise that the “one media organisation” Ronnie is talking about is The Post.

And the reasons they want to regulate the media have also been made clear by Ronnie. It is clear now that they want to regulate the media for narrow political reasons, for their own political survival.

They see The Post as a stumbling block in their desire to retain power in 2011. Why should this be so if The Post has no public support? Ronnie is saying their move to try and regulate the media is in line with the people’s wish. But we ask: which people?

The Post is the largest circulating newspaper in every town of this country. If the Zambian people didn’t like it and were with Ronnie in the efforts of his government to strangulate it, why would they be buying it every day instead of the state owned and government controlled Times of Zambia and Daily Mail?

Ronnie goes on to say that it was unethical for some newspapers to endorse particular candidates during elections. It is very embarrassing that people like Ronnie in high government positions are so eager to exhibit their ignorance. Public figures should be reluctant to talk about things they don’t understand; they should never try to explain that which is not perfectly clear to them.

While they may derive great experience from the exercise of their functions as government officials, they do not have the privilege of being – nor could they be – specialists in all social spheres. They are basically politicians – in itself one of the most difficult tasks in today’s world – and above all, they must be responsible ones.

It is very clear that Ronnie is talking about media ethics without knowing what they mean or entail. There is nothing unethical about a newspaper endorsing a particular candidate during elections. This practice is widespread in the world and has been there for a very long time. Leading newspapers in the United States, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, do endorse candidates. Many European newspapers also do that. And this practice has been there for centuries.

There is totally nothing unethical about endorsing a candidate. But speaking for ourselves, we have never endorsed a candidate. And this is not because we don’t have the right to do so; it’s simply by choice. If one day we will wake up and feel there is need to endorse a candidate, we will do so. But like everything else we do, we have to have a good reason for doing it and should be able to justify it to ourselves and others who we feel we owe a duty in that regard.

But this is characteristic of Rupiah and his ministers: they like talking about things they don’t know. And that’s why they have made wild allegations about us. This is because in their dealings with us, there is no reasoning – they are simply propelled by hatred. And that hatred arises from the fact that they can’t manipulate us, they can’t bribe us the way they do with other people they give brown envelopes, jobs and all sorts of favours.

We have many difficulties, many problems, many deficiencies but we have never been for hire to anyone. We have tried very hard to take a principled position in everything we have done, even if things have not always turned out the way we would have liked them to be.

There are no media ethics Ronnie and his friends in Rupiah’s government can teach us when they don’t have even political ethics themselves.

Ronnie claims that “certain media organisations are anti-government, they have gone political and they want to show their own candidate”. Again speaking for ourselves, we have never been anti-government because it is not possible to be so. The government of this country is not a personal property of anyone even if some people think because they have been tasked to run government on behalf of the people of Zambia, then that government belongs to them.

It doesn’t because the government of this country belongs to all Zambians, it doesn’t belong to any individual or a group of people. When the time comes, even Ronnie who thinks this government belongs to him will leave everything that belongs to the government for other people to run it on behalf of all of us.

We are also part of government. The Zambian government also belongs to us just as much as it belongs to Ronnie, Rupiah and others. If we are part of government and if the government belongs to us, how can we be anti-government? How can we be against ourselves? But Ronnie’s claim that we are anti-government is not from without. It emanates from the confusion in his head.

To Ronnie, government doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to him and his friends who hold government offices. And because of this misconception, this confusion, Ronnie sees us as spoilers, anti-government elements.

Yes, we are sometimes or often critical of the decisions and practices of those who run government on our behalf. But there can be no doubt, of course, that criticism is good for people and institutions that are part of public life. No institution, whatever, should expect to be free from the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty and support, not to mention those who don’t.

Those who run public institutions like Ronnie is doing are our servants, our workers, our employees. And if we criticise them, it doesn’t mean that we are against our own institutions in which we have employed them. Probably this is difficult discourse for Ronnie’s simple mind to follow because one needs to be broadminded to appreciate what we are trying to say. Ronnie goes on to further say that “you can’t have a media that promulgates a bad situation when it’s not bad all the time”.

It’s not good for an individual or for an organisation to lie. If The Post or any other newspaper for that matter tries to create an impression that is not there, tries to lie about the existence of certain things when they don’t exist, it won’t be long before people lose trust in it and stop buying and reading it. The media reports things or phenomena that is also witnessed by other people. If one is lying or has a wrong impression of what they have seen or heard, others will also have their own and the two will compete.

And this is why it is said that truth to relative and not absolute. Moreover, even if what Ronnie is saying was true, that would still not be a good reason for the government to regulate the media. The solution to such a problem is not to devise laws that set some arbitrary definition of truth or reality, but to increase the number of views, observations; to broaden the level of public discourse so that in the end, the correct reality is established.

And Ronnie claims that they “have one radio station which is every day insulting those in power, this is unacceptable”. Again, this only goes to show Ronnie’s serious lack of understanding of what the rule of law means in a country. This country has more than enough laws that regulate the abuse of other people. It is not for Ronnie to define what is acceptable or not acceptable, what is an insult or what is not an insult.

To Ronnie, observing that one acted stupidly or foolishly is a serious insult. But these are words that are used even in the Holy Bible to describe certain behaviour. Jesus Christ called Herod a fox because that king’s behaviour was well described by that animal’s conduct. The Penal Code has more than enough provisions that protect people from unjustified verbal or written abuses.

But there is a danger of self-contradiction when people start to talk about things they don’t fully understand. In another breath, Ronnie is saying that “the spotlight should also shine on opposition leaders, it must not be a one-sided spotlight. It must not be right for a newspaper to say Shikapwasha is an angel when I’m a thief”. Does Ronnie really mean what he is saying?

This is where the problem arises, in trying to do exactly what Ronnie is telling us to do – calling a spade a spade. Truly, it is wrong to say Ronnie is an angel when he is a thief. The right thing would be to say Ronnie is a thief.

But everybody knows what happened to us when we called a thief a thief, when we called Chiluba a thief because he was stealing public funds. The likes of Ronnie would have accused us of insulting Chiluba, of “promulgating a bad situation” when it didn’t exist. How different is what Ronnie is suggesting to what we have been doing?

The truth is they don’t like us because we have never allowed them to get away with clinched catechisms which tempt all who become part of an apparatus. They also hate us and want to regulate us because we have never allowed them to make a virtue out of their inadequacies.

But what is frightening is Ronnie’s claim that “it is the cry of the people of Zambia that if not regulated, the media owners will become too powerful. They will start directing the course of the country and will determine whether to throw the country in chaos or not”. We don’t think this is the cry of the people. The truth is this is the cry of Ronnie and his friends.

Their fear of losing power to others is frightening and if not checked will lead them to committing serious wrongs or atrocities. It’s clear that their issue with the media that is outside their control is nothing other than the fear of this making them lose power and with the loss of power, jobs and privileges. That’s all they want to regulate the media for. The rest is political rhetoric.

Labels: MEDIA, PRESS FREEDOM, REGULATION, RONNIE SHIKAPWASHA, THE POST

posted by MrK @ 5:50 AM