Political reporting (I)
Political reporting is a permanent feature of the news media. The news media were actually made for and to serve politics. Or as Fred Fedler put it rather nicely, “journalism is built on reporting government.” Politics takes up between eighty and ninety per cent of the allotted space to news in the average newspaper, daily […]
Political reporting is a permanent feature of the news media. The news media were actually made for and to serve politics. Or as Fred Fedler put it rather nicely, “journalism is built on reporting government.”
Politics takes up between eighty and ninety per cent of the allotted space to news in the average newspaper, daily or weekly, on a given day or week. The biggest news makers are invariably politicians, in or out of government. They may not always make the news but they are always part of the news. A natural disaster, such as an earthquake or a hurricane makes news by itself and by the reaction of the politician to it.
Editors and reporters cultivate politicians as regular sources of news. Some of politicians are generous men and women. They never say no to a reporter. All that a reporter needs to do to start them gushing forth is to ask them for an interview. Or they even ask to be interviewed because their weighty and wise views on the issues of the moment are dying to get out.
Politicians are the live wire of the news media. Think for a moment of what would happen to the news media – print and electronic – if all the politicians padlocked their lips. There would be no news and no newspapers, radio or television. The good news is that politicians never yield to the diabolical temptation of padlocking their lips. They never go on strike; therefore, we can safely rely on them to keep talking and thus making the news. News is the staple of the news media.
Given the foregoing, political reporting should be easy. A reporter simply reports what a politician says for his medium. End of story. This is why editors and reporters tend to take political reporting for granted. In truth, however, political reporting is fraught with dangers against which editors and reporters should maintain eternal vigilance. One bomb shell from a politician can bomb a news medium into oblivion. The libel is an ever present danger. It lurks in almost every corner of an interview that a politician grants to a reporter.
We do not have political seasons. Every season is a political season. But we do have election seasons. These are the most important political seasons here and in every country. They are the periods during which power is fought for, gained or lost. They are not often peaceful seasons. Heads and limbs do get broken; lives do get snuffed out.
I want to talk about the election season and its peculiar demands on the editor and his reporter in a two-part series in this column. Our biggest election season would be the period allowed by INEC for electioneering campaigns and the conduct of the presidential, governorship and legislative elections. In short, the general elections.
The last time we conducted those was in 2015. The next would be in 2019. But the four-year interval is taken up by minor election seasons involving the conduct of governorship and legislative elections between one general election season and another. Note the change of baton in Edo State government house; note the forthcoming governorship election in Anambra State.
It is important to note this. Despite the mutual interdependence between the politician and the reporter, both of them have different objectives or agenda. The politician is in the business of marketing himself; the reporter is in the business of informing the public. The politician ‘employs’ the reporter to market him in his medium by what he says about himself, his political party or the government in power. His strategy is a fine combination of public relations and a strong sales pitch.
The reporter’s objective is to obtain authentic information in order to properly and fairly inform the public. He needs to market his medium too. He uses the politician to do just that. The more bombastic or incendiary the politician is, the higher he is rated as a good copy by the editor and his reporter and thus the more frequently he is read or heard in the particular news medium.
The two objectives mutually reinforce one another. The problem, however, is that the reporter is the more vulnerable of the two. He is easily subject to the manipulation of the politician. Politics is a personal game and it is played for purely personal gains. The reporter needs to understand this. He needs to understand that the politician who makes such a fantastic copy is not a poster child for altruism.
Politics is also a game of mutual antagonism. All politicians have political opponents or enemies. As an old, workable survival strategy, their hands are not usually far from the enemy’s jugular. A politician’s strategy for winning or capturing power revolves around demonizing his political opponent. And the media are his media.
Support is the pillar of a politician’s professional life. He is for ever in the business of recruiting people to his side through persuasion but more usually through the corrupting influence of money. He poaches supporters from the enemy camp to swell his own. He recruits the reporter to help him in the recruitment process too because the more he is read in the newspaper or heard on the radio or seen on television the greater the chances of turning himself into a pied piper. Do you see why the politician relies on the brown envelope to open doors or whatever to the heart of the reporter?
The dividing line between public relations and crass propaganda in politics is pretty thin. An unwary reporter easily crosses it and becomes, without suspecting it, an important marketing tool in the hands of the politician. It impairs his capacity to report the truth and properly and fairly inform the public. He thus puts the integrity of medium on the line. (To be concluded)