Falsehood about the Asantehene and others; Why the media get it wrong sometimes
After his obituary was mistakenly published, Mark Twain sent a cable from London stating, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”.
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Since mass media became just that mass media, courtesy the plethora of electronic gadgets and junk that we assemble concerning ourselves, the tendency for journalists to get a story wrong has certainly increased.
Electronic search engines such as Google have contributed to lazy research practices in seeking backgrounds for stories. To add to that journalistic weakness, the propensity for every man and his dog, to jump on a ‘breaking story’ has increased exponentially with the tidal wave of communications gadgetry that the average person now has at his/her disposal and at his/her tendonitis-prone thumb tips.
There is also a tendency for a journalist, though he may be quite sincere, to simply be incapable of ridding his reportage of natural bias. Then, there is the false equivalency of a journalist or editor seeking to give ‘balance’ to a piece by allowing equal weight to both sides of the story, irrespective of which side has the truth. Add to this is the reality that to keep his job, the journalist must subscribe to the overarching bias of the editorial policy of his employer, and you have a formula for confusion.
There was an example of yet another contributor for journalists to get it wrong – the mass impact of social media. This contributed to the infamous untruth about the Asantehene being the one who bribed judges in Ghana over the election petition verdict in 2013.
The newspaper that published it (the untruth) claimed it was culled from the Internet; and that many people had read and seen it. Other media, thereafter, reported it; the story moved from print to television talk shows. What was it that moved so many to share erroneous communication so widely and rapidly that it was accepted as fact and reported to the public via the mass media?
Falsehood
The use of reports from social media sources, combined with the lust to be the first with the information, drive a great part of the media industry into mass acceptance of falsehood. Again, it has contributed to the unfortunate news that the Asantehene had passed on while on a visit to South Africa a few weeks ago. These incidents must have been painful, uncomfortable and disheartening periods in the reign of the honourable king.
Two things could have driven the act of mass misreporting. First, is the “hunger for the most current information”. That desire is an offshoot of the late 20th and early 21st century lust for instant gratification: We want it and we want it now.
The second is the need to talk – to be the first to spread the news; to be the one who “broke” the story to others. This stems from today’s social media frenzy of messaging about what “I’m doing now”: what I just did”; “what I just saw’; or ‘what have you heard”? Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp, among others, are classic examples of platforms where such messaging has become routine and expected.
Predicting the future
Regarding journalistic efforts to predict the future outcome of an event, the best that the news media can do is to guess. The facts might suggest that a certain outcome is inevitable – yet so many variables can lead to that guess proving wrong. Analytic journalistic pieces cannot predict with certainty the outcome of a major world event. So how does one really get to the truth on any matter these days when we are so attuned to the instantaneous nature of the “breaking’’ story via social media in particular?
A good start would report with a healthy skepticism unless the reporter produces hard and primary evidence of the story’s reality. With the plethora of news that inundates us from all angles, 24 hours, seven days a week, this would seem an impossible task. Given the state of today’s mass media confusion, is there any news source that you can really rely on?
The mass media are a profit-making enterprise. Many organs of the press went broke as electronic media increasingly took over from newspaper and magazine news publishing.
The survivors are those that still turn a profit or continue to struggle to turn one; too often, maintaining sales by dumping their editorial approach downward so as to cater for the rapidly descending public taste.
A prudent newspaper will never change its editorial policy of seeking, exhaustively researching and publishing the truth; - no matter how unpopular the message, no matter how politically incorrect, no matter how much opposition it provokes. It will not dump down its message to popularise it so as to cater for the public’s taste. In fact, it will probably have the world’s most unpopular message to deliver. But it will remain honourable and a trustworthy newspaper.