Walk in journalists’ shoes and you will understand they try to deliver

Recently, Oxford University hosted a special seminar on Media Conflict and Democracy in Africa that was co-organised by the African Studies Centre and the Reuters Institute. One of the speakers was Catherine Gicheru, editor of The Star newspaper. Catherine is well placed to talk about Kenyan journalism: As well as being the editor of one of the country’s more independent minded papers, she used to work at the Nation, rising through the ranks to become one of the first women news editors of a mainstream newspaper in the region.

Catherine’s comments put the African media in a different light. While accepting that bribery and corruption take place, she talked about the struggle that many journalists undergo to promote democracy and defend human rights.

Listening to her, it became clear that many journalists would like to publish more critical and hard-hitting pieces, and would like to have more time to investigate complex stories. The problem is not simply a lack of will or interest, but the fact that they face major barriers — repressive governments, nervous management boards, low pay, and weak job security.

Another speaker at the workshop, Alexandra Reza, a researcher at Oxford, who used to run a prize for African journalists, also highlighted both sides of this complex issue. On the one hand, she talked about the media houses that fund themselves by charging politicians set amounts to receive coverage on the front page, or on prime time TV, ignoring the real stories of the day.

On the other hand, she highlighted some of the dangers faced by those prepared to speak the truth to power, and her stories about journalists from across the continent revealed the terrifying risks reporters incur on a daily basis.

The numbers make for disconcerting reading. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, in 2013 four journalists died in Somalia and two in Mali. Ten journalists have been killed in Nigeria since 1992.

Four journalists have been killed in Kenya since 2000. It is easy for those standing on the sidelines to criticise the media in Africa, but I wonder how many of us would act differently if we had to walk in a journalist’s shoes.

If we want to improve the quality of the media in Africa it is, therefore, important to appreciate that African journalists are not simply doing a bad job. Many are in fact struggling to do a good job against almost insurmountable odds.

It is also important to recognise that this is not an “African problem”. Of the eight worst-rated countries, only two – Equatorial Guinea and Eritrea – were African. Beralus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan are the other six.

PRESS FREEDOM

Indeed, readers may be surprised to learn that sub-Saharan Africa was the only region that did not suffer a significant decline in press freedom over the last year according to Freedom House, the American think tank that measures freedom levels around the world.

Elsewhere, the situation got worse: Conditions in the Middle East and in North Africa deteriorated. Overall, global press freedoms are at their lowest level for a decade and as I write only one in seven people live in a country with a “free press”.

By contrast, 42 per cent of the world’s population lives in “partly free” media environments, while some 44 per cent reside in states with almost no press freedom at all.
But this doesn’t mean media freedom is not a problem in Africa too.

A majority of Africans (56 per cent) live in countries where the media is only “partly free”. This is a sad state of affairs, and there was no overall improvement in 2013. Although there has been some progress in the areas of legal regulation and economic conditions, Freedom House finds that these were balanced out by a deteriorating political context. In other words, the situation facing the media may look better on the surface, but in reality higher levels of government repression have negated these gains.

This overall trend hides a number of important variations, however. Things got better in West Africa, with gains in Mali, Senegal and Togo, while Cote d’Ivoire was upgraded to “partly free” status. But some countries experienced a marked deterioration in press freedom, with South Sudan and Zambia downgraded to “not free”. Regular readers of this column will not be surprised to hear that a number of East African countries also suffered declines.

The way in which the media in these countries are being controlled is different from North Korea. Most African governments simply lack the state capacity to impose the kind of surveillance and censorship infrastructure that has been erected in places such as China or Cuba.

As a result, the media in Africa often looks freer than it actually is because much of the repression is not done in the open, or through direct state control, but in the shadows, through informal channels and personal connections.

INTIMIDATE CRITICAL PRESS

The relationship between the Jubilee Alliance and the Kenyan media is a case in point. Like some of its predecessors, the government has adopted three main strategies to intimidate the more critical press. First, it introduced legislation to curb media freedom. The new provisions were not intended to be used on a day-to-day basis — this would be inefficient and would provoke widespread criticism at home and abroad.

Rather, they were introduced as a way of reminding the press not to “overstep the mark”. The second strategy is to punish newspapers that publish critical stories by moving government adverts to rival publications.

Given that government adverts can comprise up to 50 per cent of a newspaper’s revenue, this is a stick that can be used to beat the press back into line. Even newspapers that sell tens of thousands of copies, such as the Daily Nation and The Standard, can ill-afford to go without government advertising for too long.

When these are not enough to deter the media, a third strategy comes into play. Over the last year, senior figures close to the government have taken to calling editors to warn them off certain stories, or to request them to modify their analysis.

The ability and willingness of editors to ignore these demands has been shaped by a number of factors including whether they have the support of their bosses and whether their media house respects the independence of its editors.

Taken together, these three strategies have gone a long way to make life more difficult for even the most free-thinking journalists operating in Kenya. But if we are to fully understand the problems of the African media we must also be prepared to cast a critical eye over the way in which the press runs itself.

Speaking at the Oxford workshop, Winston Mano, editor of the Journal of African Media Studies, argued that at times the African media is its own worst enemy. Too often, important stories are dropped because they will not sell as many copies as a populist headline. One of the biggest problems is the way journalists are employed.

Few journalists in Kenya are on secure long-term contracts. Instead, many are “stringers” and are only paid if an article gets accepted. This means they face strong incentives to avoid controversial or unpopular topics that might get “spiked” by an editor because no story equals no pay. Many stringers admit this basic calculation means they tend to submit relatively safe stories.

In this way, self-censorship has been institutionalised within the Kenyan media. Therefore, the problem is not simply that editors or management boards are scared to run critical stories, but that in many cases editors don’t actually receive critical stories in the first place.

But it is not all doom and gloom. Kenya has one of the most engaged, well-produced, and widely consumed media on the continent. It is a media that has tried hard to put issues like corruption and government incompetence on the front pages. This is something that the media has yet to achieve in countries like Iran, North Korea – and in many African states.

Dr Nic Cheeseman is the Director of the African Studies Centre at Oxford University and the founder of www.democracyinafrica.org