Adigun Agbaje

Writing on the Ghana experience of the media as watchdog, Kwame Karikari shows that the conditions for the media to exercise the level of independence and freedom required for them to perform that role exist in Ghana, but the media’s performance in this regard is adjudged by even industry stakeholders as falling far short of what is possible and necessary. Such a self-assessment, according to him, suggests that in spite of the favourable environment, the generality of the Ghanaian media lack what media scholar Curran calls the “disciplined moral passion, hard work and intelligence” and “robust independence” required for the media to perform the role of watchdog in a democracy.
Chapter 12 by AbiodunSalawu and KayodeEesuola rounds off the book’s comparative section with a report on the media and elections in Nigeria and Ghana. It offers a succinct political history of the two countries against the backdrop of scholarly writing on the relationship between the media and politics/democracy and then caps it all with a focus on its subject. The chapter ends on the note that, in regard of elections, the media in both countries “are indeed watchdogs, not captured”.
The book’s concluding chapter offers a retrospective and prospective look on the fortunes of the Nigerian media in the Fourth Republic in terms of the original question that the book set out to answer: watchdog, or captured? Here, Ayo Olukotun, editor of the book, does an admirable job of putting together the matters arising from the various chapters to revisit the performance debate, an activity that appears to have led him away from the imagery suggested in the book’s title toward a more complex assessment. Although made in regard of the specific subject of media corruption, I take editorial license to generalisehis conclusion to read that “the media and their performance cannot be fixed” into one extremely beautiful/positive group of watchdogs contrasted with another extremely ugly/negative group of the captured, indicating that “it is difficult to uphold a verdict that the media have become a captured institution”. The chapter furthernote exceptions at the corporate levels to such generally held views of the media as corrupt, and unable to pay living wages. It goes on to show how, despite the broad inability of the media to fully reenact its “magnificent” role against military rule, “the flames of daring and investigative journalism continue to flicker now and again” in the Fourth Republic.
Thus, in the face of compelling evidence from excellent studies of cases, issues and events, this important book concludes appropriately on a note that its core mandate to examine the extent to which the media have evinced the elements of either watchdog or that of capture has not been as unambiguous as originally conceptualized. In the face of overwhelming evidence, the mandate has led to ambiguous, mixed and therefore more realistic results, showing that between watchdog and capture is a continuum rather than a disconnected choice ofantonyms as options. Such a continuum operates at several levels of practice and of analyses, from the level of individual media professionals to that of their unions at the level of beats/units/specializations and at broader levels, from corporate levels to industry level, from issue to issue, event to event, country to country, and time to time. This realization offers a more complex template for seeking appropriate recommendations for practice, policy, and scholarship that neither simplifies such enterprise nor seeks to apply solutions crafted from one experience indiscriminately to different contexts.
It could, for instance, be counterproductive to engage in the training of Nigerian journalists on the ethical foundations of the watchdog role of the media with tool kits developed from the United States experience not only because the contexts are broadly different but also because of the fact that even the Americans are still trying to grapple with the challenges of not only fashioning out appropriate ethical frames for their own media but also because Americans do not appear to have arrived at substantive consensus on the ethics of media work.
For instance, the view generally identified with much of media mainstream in the United States is that the construction and pursuit of professional and ethical codes must be contextualized (see Ferre 2008: 164-166). Thus, while media professionals in the European tradition tend to be more readily disposed to mobilization to support and promote campaigns for freedoms of expression for political opposition and the broad spectrum of the media, those in the American tradition tend to be swayed more by the argument that the mainstream media and their journalists should not be too active in political and social struggles.

As indicated above, cases from the United States underscore the extent to which perception of media professional and ethical codes differ even within a single country, and from one media establishment to the other (Ferre 2008: 164-166). A classic example of the latter was captured in a study of codes of ethics in 33 media organizations commissioned by the American Society of Newspaper Editors whose findings included many disparities among the media houses on the boundaries of the acceptable and the unacceptable on such matters as plagiarism, whether or not gifts, including sponsored trips, should be accepted in exchange for publishing a story, standards of privacy for public figures and private citizens, contributions to political campaigns or membership of political parties by journalists, the extent and importance of distancing “the interests of the newsroom from the advertising department,” journalists in private media establishments drawing stipends from government for working in support of domestic and foreign policy goals of government, as well as the correction of errors in published content (Ferre 2008).

Ethical considerations in the quality of election reportage in the United States, agold standard of conductfor many countries, including Nigeria, also continue to attract attention. It has, for instance, been observed over the years that voters have become the central victim of election campaign reportage that focuses on trivia and is basically “substanceless – when it hasn’t been deliberately deceptive.” Such reportage prefers to define standards for attracting media and electability in terms of personalities over and above campaign ideas, and privileges event-driven reportage over and above issue-based reportage “(Alterman 2012: 12).

Also at the centre of current concern is a creeping process of commoditization and corporatization (Editors 2002) of media fare, including election reportage. All this has been complemented by the incursion of elements of public relations practice into journalism, raising questions in regard of media morality and creating a “Catch-22” situation for journalists wants to stick to professionalism even at the risk of losing privileged access to news sources. Matters of loyalty to “clients,” adoption by journalists of such traditional public relations practices as “front groups,” essentially involving the “manufacturing” of news, and “astroturfing,”involving schemes to “manufacture” or generate grassroots support, have slowly but steadily seeped into journalism practice, and especially so into election reportage.

The paragraphs above underscore the point that ethical debates and practices around the world in regard of the role of the media in bringing about, consolidating or sustaining democracy remain largely contested and unsettled, and are often shaped by specific contexts. That, of course, is not to state that, in the realm of aspirations and ideals, ethical issues should not be statedin absolute terms. They should be. In the realm of practice, however, we have to continue to debate and valorize the boundaries of the possible and seek ways to approximate the ideal in all its positive prescription while finding ways to reduce the negative stumbling blocks on our path in this regard at various levels from individuals to corporate organisations to the national and international terrains. As former editor of the Guardian, Mr. Martins Oloja, who was present at the public presentation of Watchdogs or captured Media, recently put it (Oloja 2018:13), “proprietors of news media firms in Nigeria should brace up for serious public service journalism in the coming months. 2019 is too important to be left to the vagaries of citizen journalism alone”.
For now, we are stuck with a “Republic” officially committed to democracy, labeled an “emergent democracy” since its beginning almost two decades ago while all along being literally led away from democracy by its political elite. In effect, the “Republic” has largely been characterized by the use of the appearances, symbols and language of democracy to subvert democracy (democratism), complemented by the use of the appearances, symbols and appurtenances of regular elections (electoralism) to subvert the substantive dimensions of meaningful elections, leading to a whole regime of recession signposted by democratic, electoral, institutional, infrastructural, ethical, moral, federal and leadership recession, and a rampart growth in the culture of impunity and the weakening of the sinews of restraint in public and private life.
I believe that Ayo Olukotun and his team have, withWatchdogs or Captured Media?, ensured that soon, Nigerians will start talking again with renewed vigour on the complexities of the role of the media in the difficult terrain described above – and that would, indeed, be a good thing.

*AdigunAgbaje is a Professor of Political Communication at the University of Ibadan, author of The Nigerian press, hegemony, and the social construction of legitimacy, 1960-1983 (1992), and corresponding editor for the journal, Media, Culture and Society(London).