Yes, we growl and bite. Yes, we have sharp teeth and strong grip. But we are the prerequisite for progress. We are the antidote against tyranny – Dmitry Muratov, Russian journalist and winner (with Maria Ressa) of Nobel Prize for Peace, 2021
Happy New Year, ladies and gentlemen of the Press!
First, the good news. You are the good news. A journalist at work is the best evidence of the promise of democracy, of a free, open and progressive society.
At the start of 2023, you are the living proof that journalism is here to stay. No one and nothing will ever take away from society the need to inform, educate, entertain, analyse, and to hold power to account.
You have the full mandate to enforce responsible exercise of public power; to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable; to proclaim from the rooftops what some people might want whispered or totally hidden.
In sum, democracy is a hollow concept without journalism.
In your work you celebrate the nation’s milestones. You follow and document individual and collective pursuits of happiness; you display and affirm the rich heritage of our people; unite citizens through shared consciousness; you highlight the bold searches for solutions, the hits and misses, failures and threats. You are the custodians of our nation’s soul.
That’s the good news. The bad?
Ahem, the past year closed with weeping and gnashing of teeth across media houses. The industry is in crisis, no question about it. Journalists have been laid off, those still at work are unsure of their jobs and some of the best in the business have quit in pursuit of greener pastures – leaving with them a wealth of professional competencies and verve that are sometimes hard to replace.
Numerous storms have battered the media in recent years, ranging from a collapsed economy to political pressures, poor business leadership and devastations of the Digital Revolution.
But there is nothing new in these events. At no time in media history has journalism fully escaped the pressures of bad business, political repression or the tyrannies of technological advance. And journalism has weathered these storms. Always.
These too shall pass.
But look around: If the media is failing to play its central role in democracy, is being increasingly sneered at and ignored by audiences, our number one worry should be the crisis of public confidence arising from poor quality.
There’s genuine concern about journalism that has lost touch with the needs of news consumers; a “churnalism” that takes audiences for granted; that lacks rigour and has strayed from its ethical core; a wishy-washy Fourth Estate whose sharp edge has been blunted by partisan agendas.
More than 85 years since German journalist Carl von Ossietzky won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935 for revealing his country’s secret post-war rearmament, Russian Dmitry Muratov and Filipino Maria Ressa won the award in 2021.
Ressa founded the investigative website ‘Rappler’ that focused much of her work on former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s controversial and violent war on drugs. The award-winning journalist was convicted of libel in 2020 and sentenced to jail.
“If you keep the North Star ahead of you, you protect the facts, you hold power to account. You exercise the rights in the Philippine Constitution. That’s what we did, and that’s what we’ll keep doing,” Ressa said.
Muratov co-founded the independent Russian newspaper ‘Novaya Gazeta’ in 1993 and has been its editor-in-chief for 26 years. Six of the newspaper’s journalists have been murdered for their work.
We all know what kind of journalism wins awards. Courageous, high-impact stories produce results. The grumbling that people are no longer interested in journalism is lame.
One of the major media highlights of 2022 was the conviction and sentencing of quack doctor Mugo wa Wairimu to 29 years in prison. He was in trial for seven years. The entire nation followed the story.
It is possible Mugo would never have been caught without the media breaking the story.
For all those years Mugo made illegal and immoral money from messing up the lives of sick women who sought his help, there were police. There were government regulatory agencies mandated to oversight medical practice. There were city county authorities that dutifully licensed his work and premises.
But they didn’t catch him. Journalism did.
The 2023 challenge for every media house and journalist is to do compelling stories that nobody can ignore.
See you next week!
