Politicians And The Media Circus

This article is dedicated to Mpodol Um Nyobe who actively sought the freedom of Cameroon from colonialism and neo-colonialism, but whom French journalists presented to the world as a dangerous communist agent and convinced "us" to cooperate in his murder 50 years ago (on 13 September 1958).
By Tazoacha Asonganyi
The news media are like a great pumping heart that circulates ideas, opinions and images in society and permits individual citizens to make up their minds about issues. In a sense, the media are the great levellers, permitting every current of opinion to be heard, permitting different faces and characters to be known.

Public opinion is like a vane that determines the direction of the wind; the information circulated by the media constituting the wind. The blowing of the media wind influences the direction of public opinion, which keeps changing as it gets fed with information, different points of view, different images, and different sound bites.

The motor of the media is the journalist. Journalists are the ones that select the commodities for sale: news and good ideas. Without necessarily being part of what happens, they report news of the happening. Some are opinion journalists, colouring their reports with their personal points of view; other are just plain good journalists reporting faithfully each happening. To their own good ideas, they add those of various contributors to accompany the news in their media outlets.

The massive information current created by the media could make and break reputations. It showcases all types of journalists. Some may get personal, but such are too transparent to be harmful. Others are more sophisticated, and can turn your words around to ridicule you: those are the ones that can be harmful!

Politicians always want to raise a curtain between their private lives and the public. They lay claim to two private lives that the journalist should keep away from: the domestic and the private dimension of their public lives. But politicians, so long as they seek the people’s mandate, cannot separate the private from the public because voters want to know everything about them. It is the duty of the journalist to facilitate this. The screaming of the McCain/Palin campaign under the boot of the press only highlighted this.

Apart from their private lives, another headache for the politician is the engineering aspect of journalism: cutting and pasting to create texts, images, and sounds. One shot plus one shot; one sound plus one sound: that is the work of professional image makers; of political kingmakers! Many politicians have fallen prey to such engineering.

During the 1976 presidential campaign in the USA a journalist put a question to Jimmy Carter in the religious realm: have you ever committed adultery? He delved into the bible, quoting Mathew 5: 27-28 that says that he who looks on a woman to lust for her has committed adultery. After all of it the journalist repeated the question and Carter responded: yes, I have lusted. The answer nearly cost him the election because the news media were awash with his admission of having committed adultery, without any mention of the lecture from Matthew!

Margaret Thatcher learned the hard way too. Following a victory at a battle during the Falklands War the journalists kept pestering her with the question: what next? In anger she responded that they should just rejoice; rejoice at the victory of the forces. The next day the press was awash with the headlines that she said the British should rejoice in the war (as if war was something to rejoice about!).

John Fru Ndi may not easily forget that although he may never have made the statement himself, the statement that Paul Biya is a bloody liar was attributed to him in a shouting headline. The fuss over the authorship of the statement only helped to reinforce the fact that the journalist did his job well!

Journalists are always hungry for drama, splits, and clashes in politics. This is why it is interesting that Augustine Frederick Kodock, a factional leader of the UPC had the guts to issue stern warnings to journalists about reporting on the UPC! Following such effrontery, the journalists seemed to only tiptoe through the shattered terrain of the UPC until one of them in front page coverage, called the bluff and gave a detailed analysis of the problems in the beleaguered party.

Some people think that being in politics is an exercise in vanity – being heard and seen for the sake of it; being at the centre of media events - the television cameras, the regular meetings with journalists, the quotes and regular reports that come up in the media. In the final analysis, opposition politicians end up seeming to be doing little more than seeking cheap popularity out of managing the image of the regime they seek to unseat! The more they are heard and seen, the more "democratic" the regime is thought to be. So long as not much is moving right, it all ends up like a big media circus, a refuge from where they air their grievances without any organised plan to break the vicious cycle.