A journalist wants a good story to tell. That is how you keep your job. It is how the news organization you work for keeps the promise to its audiences, wins public trust, survives the competition, keeps the ads coming and gets a host of other goodies essential to this business.
But that is just basic. A scribe is not merely a chronicler of incidents, however exciting those events might be. The best journalist is permanently sceptical – without being cynical.
I don’t dismiss this out of hand, but is it really true? That is the billion-Naira question. Oga!
It turns out, however, that scribes are becoming too credulous. Too trusting. Or intellectually lazy. Or do some of them actually collude with fraudsters to create and spread fake news?
It could be a bigger problem. We live in a society where millions of people accept without question just about any tall tales spun by politicians, clever gospel entrepreneurs and many other con artists and mythmakers. It must be true if someone in authority says it. Might is right. An anti-intellectual culture seems to be taking root, where it is considered offensive to question things.
According to a report by K24 TV on 9 April, a farm hand in Busia County started oozing maggots from his private parts after he slept with the wife of his employer. The alleged randy man took off with the employer’s wife. The estranged husband sought the services of a “witch doctor”, who cast a spell on the offender.
Ebru TV broadcast a similar report. Citizen TV ran the story under the headline, “Costly infidelity.”
After viewers questioned the authenticity of the story, K24 TV stood by it and did a follow-up report last Tuesday.
But The Observer has, in fact, established that the story was fake.
According to a reliable source, a female “witchdoctor” paid a man Sh.6,000 to arrange the event, including getting fake eyewitnesses. The source said they were not told exactly what to do at the place they were told to assemble.
“Within minutes TV crews arrived. The woman who had paid us also arrived with a man. The man went berserk and started to remove maggots from his private parts. Within a short time he was put in a vehicle and taken to an unknown place. That was the end of our work,” the source said.
There you have it.
News managers, you have a tough job.
