If people are starving that is because Britain has imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe.
Or so says the great leader. And state media repeat these falsehoods ad nauseam.
They are designed to keep power in the hands of the ruling elite. They perpetuate the poverty and misery of the vast majority. They drive millions of Zimbabweans out of their homeland into the diaspora. It takes torture and violence to silence the people who know these lies contradict what they see with their own eyes every day.
They say the Vietnam War was lost in American living rooms: when Americans saw the reality of the war, its brutality and inhumanity on their TV screens they turned against it. The US government could no longer sustain a war that had lost the support of its citizens.
German children used to ask their parents after World War II, How was it possible that Hitler murdered six million Jews in the Holocaust, and you did not know about it?
It is true, most people did not know about it. This was possible because Hitler controlled all the media. Radio was used for the first time as a powerful propaganda instrument. Reality was no longer what people saw with their own eyes. People were forced to see the world at large through the spectacles that propaganda gave them. Anyone caught listening to a foreign radio station was put into a concentration camp and condemned to a slow death. If you suppress the truth you get away with murder.
How come the Soviet Empire collapsed in 1989/90 even though the Iron Curtain and tight media controls isolated the people from the outside world? Well, they didn’t. In this media age you cannot close off a society completely. Radio waves do not respect national boundaries and do not know what national sovereignty means. We need the truth as badly as the air we breathe.
The media is supposed to penetrate the thick layers of ideological fog and political propaganda, getting as close to the underlying reality as possible. If we have the facts and can see them in their true context we can arrive at an independent judgment. We can make our own choice. We are no longer captives of the powers that be. Which is why regimes imposing themselves on the people by force cannot allow free access to the truth. The first things they do after taking over the presidential palace is to occupy the broadcasting station. Media workers must be people with a passion for the truth. That is the service they render to the community. That is their vital function in society: to give the facts, confront people with reality and to tell the truth, forever cutting through lies, propaganda and fraud.
People cannot take part in the democratic process unless they are properly informed. National leaders as well owners of private media may not see it that way: they employ media workers to tell the world the stories that they want the world to hear. And maybe some media workers too are less interested in telling the world objective truth than to support a certain cause.
But a media worker must first and foremost see him/herself as member of the media profession which wants to communicate a comprehensive view of reality to the public and not just a narrow partisan view of it .
A conflict between the conscience of the individual media worker and his employer’s policy cannot be excluded. Is conscience something a media worker cannot afford once he is employed in a media house with its laid-down policy?
A journalist should have the courage of his convictions and not just be a hired pen. In a free society there should be room for journalists of conscience and a strong sense of responsibility.
What is unacceptable is that in repressive societies media workers are compelled to be two-faced: what they are forced to say publicly completely contradicts their own personal perception of reality. Aware of corruption, they have to sing the praises of the moral integrity of the leaders. Better informed about the decay and collapse of the country than most, they have to make people believe that the country is making wonderful progress.
Such reporting is not only misleading the people and damaging the country, it is also humiliating for the media worker and violating his human dignity. It makes him a slave of his employers and reduces her to a mindless tool. Journalists need a very broad education. Only if you have a deep knowledge of a subject can you ask relevant questions about it. You need to be aware of the complexity of issues to be able to represent them adequately. Facts by themselves mean little if you do not know the background and cannot put them into context.
Reporting the fact of widespread hunger in a given area at a given time only makes sense if you give the necessary depth to the story by analyzing the causes: crop failure due to climatic change and lack of rain, but also economic mismanagement, unequal land distribution and ownership, land degradation, imbalances in international trade, etc.
The more familiar a writer is with the complexity of a story, its background and context the less will he claim to do full justice to it. A truly wise person knows how much he does not know, and admits modestly that his story is far from being the last word.
While in some countries journalists are persecuted and harassed for making independent enquiries and need to be protected, elsewhere they may pose a threat to society by becoming all-powerful and irresponsible, condemning whoever is deemed to be out of step with public opinion, progress or whatever else is considered the ultimate measuring rod of the day. If media becomes the highest tribunal in the land, is there no court of appeal? Are people left helpless and powerless vis a vis an all-powerful media? Does freedom of expression give a few privileged people, i.e. media workers, the right to condemn, defame, ridicule everything and everyone else? The cartoons in the Western press ridiculing the prophet Muhammad, a sacred figure to one billion Muslims, come to mind: is freedom of expression an absolute right without any limitations? This would clash with the general principle that my rights and freedoms end where yours begin.No one is above the law. We cannot tolerate a media which judges everything and everyone but cannot be judged itself. Independent courts, if they exist, can of course be approached and deliver judgment. But court procedures are long, cumbersome and expensive. Justice must be done speedily to undo the damage.
Media workers themselves who accept that they serve the public and are therefore answerable to it are nowadays setting up their own courts of appeal’, media councils and complaints committees to which members of the public can appeal if they feel they have been wronged. Such arbitration councils if accepted by all media houses and the entire media fraternity can administer justice speedily and effectively in a self-regulatory manner. There is no need for the state to set up such a body. What the people can do for themselves, the state should not try to control. Government is too partisan, dominated as it is by politicians, to be trusted with this delicate task. The Media Council has to educate its own members about proper media ethics which must be guided by a spirit of service to the community, a passion for truth and respect for the individual person. The media must accept its limitations and its circumscribed role in society which it has to serve, not to dominate. – Fr Oskar Wermter SJ is vice-chairman of the Voluntary Media Council of Zimbabwe and chairman of the training committee.