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Muted voices:Whom do voices from Dar,Dodoma represent?
2005-11-05 07:26:05
By Ani Jozeni
With general elections approaching over the past few months, and to some planners or say media researchers, this situation existing for most of the past year, the media itself has been on trial.
Only in one instance has a credible case been made to show the limitations of local journalism, with regard to the weight of CCM coverage in Zanzibar media organs most of which are state-run.
Even on that score there were problems with some of the criticism, as it didn’t consider the demand side, whether people were interested equally in the news from other sources, or parties.
This difficulty, of what one may rapidly call ’supply side’ view of journalism, where newspapers and radios decide for a particular mode of coverage, was also raised in a more intense manner by a local researcher.
Veteran journalist and university staff member Charles Kayoka wrote an insightful piece on how reporting in the country was ’muting’ other voices.
He used data obtained in a 44-day ’quantitative pilot monitoring exercise’ of six morning dailies in the national language, and noticed a huge imbalance of events covered in their regional patterns.
Dar es Salaam featured rather too heavily followed partially by Dodoma, and others - poorly.
Dar es Salaam took a hefty 48.0 per cent of front-page stories and Dodoma 17.5 per cent while the National Assembly was meeting in Dodoma, in the first phase of that study.
In its second phase, when the legislature was not in session, Dar es Salaam took 31 per cent of the space (items) and foreign sources now received a hefty 72.0 per cent as against 15.2 per cent in the first phase.
It means that elimination of parliamentary news was compensated by foreign news while regional news remained poor represented.
The analyst thus concludes that there is an over-dependence on official sources he says are usually prominent, in which case the ’voices of other people’ are left to the margin.
He qualifies the latter as the ’voices of ordinary men and women who may have concerns that need national attention,’ which ordinarily means they have complaints, reporting on abuses of various sorts, etc.
An implication arising from this imbalance, according to the researcher, is that ’it means that regions getting less coverage contribute nothing to the nation in political, social, economic or cultural terms or to national debates on various issues.’
And the author is sufficiently sure of this situation as a moral problem.
It puts into question the ’professional capabilities of individual journalists,’whether they receive enough training to cultivate a ’sensitive and critical eye’ for aspects that can make news among the ordinary people.
Official human sources and documents are too dominant in the media, on account of journalists’ disabilities.
The question is therefore how ’to make sure that the mass media becomes mouth pieces of all and sundry, and not merely organs whose function is to deliver authority to the people.’
This way, the media will enable accountability, instead of taking official sources or information down to the people, characterized by the preponderant place that Dar es Salaam occupies in the regional space sources of news.
And since this view is naturally true, it is easy for the author to blame journalists ’lack of enterprise (which) makes it impossible for them to cultivate their own sources of news.
They always need some important and prominent officials in the government or organizations to make a statement, to create the news agenda for them.’ But how far is there a valid notion of ’news’ in this contention or is the author chasing after windmills?
The author projects a news coverage notion where each region is just as important as the other and in covering a region, each source of news is just as important as the other.
And in covering the news, it can be projected that each region should have five per cent of the news (as we have some 20 regions) and perhaps a doubling for Dar es Salaam for obvious reasons.
Since the author is a noted commentator on gender imbalances, up to half of the sources would have to be women, to reflect equal presence in society at large, and where possible, at least a third of official spokespersons would also be women. Is that projection serious?
Obviously this view is informed by a concept of news that treats each person as equal to the other in terms of being a news source, but some people are privileged so they can create news with ease.
In that case a journalist has to exercise some vigilance – assuming he or she is sufficiently trained for that orientation – where it is natural or likely for him or her to take up news from the people in ordinary activities.
Taking up official spokesmen or women, or experts, and relying on documents (of various sorts) is a kind of laziness. It facilitates the privileged to provide most ’news’ given.
It this underlining idea of equality which is at issue, and is true of various instances of ’media bashing’ for instance in remarks by President Paul Kagame lately, that the West shouldn’t just report what happens in Africa, but the ’facts’ underlying this situation.
By that he meant (definitely) the legacy of colonialism, current hardships arising from globalization and decline of prices of cash crops, etc.
The global media is rapped for extensively covering riots or police shooting of people in Zanzibar, but paying scarcely any attention to the opening of the Mkapa Bridge in the Dar-Lindi road.
How far is this media criticism valid, reflecting real needs?
When one looks at the issue from the viewpoint of representative government, it changes radically.
All higher state authorities are located in Dar es Salaam, and in the regions, there is an intense focus on this or that area not when they conduct daily activities but when they become the momentary centre of national activity, for instance if the president is touring.
Nor is it surprising that the media focuses on what touches life, liberty and property, thus an instance of murder, arrest, accident, disputes of ownership have a more elevated status as news. One’s insecurity is a peril for us all.
There is in that case what can be described as ’nominalism,’ from the term ’nom’ or word in French, meaning one thing capable of having a name.
In a ’nominal’ situation, only the fact of being a person capable of saying anything in particular matters, and it is taken for granted that everyone, and every region, has such ability.
In that case a critical attitude requires that a journalist must not get frightened or ingratiate himself unnecessarily with those who hold political power and privilege news concerning them.
It thoroughly ignores the rules of representation in the whole idea of governance, and in organization of civil society.
In reality, news is not what each person has to say but it is in the first collective, that is, how far it concerns everyone.
In that sense news about the government, and chiefly about the Head of State, is far superior to plenty of other minor news being made at some other place, for this latter concerns but a few people.
News about the legislature is also of paramount importance, but only second to the Head of State, that is why Parliament is made of two parts – the legislature and the president.
If he doesn’t sign a text into law it doesn’t become one, for he has a collective mandate with which to guide the country’s destiny, whereas they each have a fragmented mandate to guide development in a constituency, and help vote texts into law. This structure of things is basic to news.
At the other end, all popular representative organizations like NGOs, churches or other community groups, foreign envoys etc who represent a view of what the world sees happening here, are all located in Dar es Salaam.
Thus the latter can’t just become a source of news like any other, nor indeed take up twice the total amount of space (items) that any other region would get.
In so far as the news concerns the central government or any organization that is of countrywide importance, it has to be seen in a collective or representative fashion, not nominally as news coming from one region, Dar es Salaam.
It represents all other regions and thus it is a unitary piece of news about Tanzania - not a fragmentary item.
It can therefore be seen that there is a kind of ’deconstruction’ of the idea of news that the author operates, in a fashion that is not altogether strange from among anarchists.
The manner the news is reported, the hierarchy that arises from collective matters or the sense of destiny and how it is fashioned at each moment (in the various spheres, local and worldwide) revolts the anarchist.
Had it been that ordinary people’s concerns are given due attention most of the people would gradually lose attachment to government and political parties, and anarchy as a system would be introduced.
Its basic view of things is that society should be organized in terms of small self-governing groups, perhaps with a loose entity called government, but perhaps.
Yet this giant project is frustrated each passing day by the mass media, reinforcing the legitimacy of the state by dwelling unceasingly and incessantly on the ’comings and goings’ of the political and commercial elite, the stinking rich, and their frivolous disputes. This is what qualifies as ’news.’
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