Unity of purpose: Standing together to safeguard press freedom
By Churchill Otieno
Delegates at the 4th Annual Editors Convention held in Naivasha, Kenya in December 2021 raise lit cellphones in a solemn candle-light tribute to fallen colleagues.
Journalists in eastern Africa must “all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately”. These words were Benjamin Franklin’s caution to Americans as they worked on their independence, but they ring so loud and true of the media landscape in the region today.
An increasing number of regional journalists are finding themselves unable to practise independently, or at all, for a variety of reasons. Interference by the State and by commercial interests rank high among factors crippling a free media, but failure of the business model has grown in importance in recent times.
No matter the underlying causes, journalism is not a crime and the people of eastern Africa are owed a constant supply of easily accessible credible information, if democracy is to take root.
Given the sheer number of challenges that abound, it may seem that nothing short of magic will save our journalism. But that doomsday fatalism must not find home in our hearts. No! Instead, committed journalism should look beyond the survivalist mantra and boldly seize the silver opportunity that the cloud of doom masks. It is time to bind as professional journalists and seek new paths that put public interest at the centre.
As professionals, five questions define the opportunity that exists to innovate and grow the space. They all speak to the need to grow regional solidarity as a way to enabling professional excellence and activating group strength.
The first question speaks to newsroom safety. We have to be our brothers’ keeper. In most newsrooms in the region, even those in big media houses, safety is given little more than lip service. We find little documentation of incidents and rarely do we find safety protocols in place. In some, a holistic awareness – physical, digital, and psychosocial – is lacking.
Regular waves of political tension and anxiety always translate to a spike in media threats and attacks, especially in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. The situation in some eastern African countries, particularly Tanzania and Ethiopia, is precarious because of a fluid political environment and a leadership increasingly intolerant of criticism and press freedom. In Tanzania, for example, the media space significantly shrunk and some journalists and media houses have come under intense political pressure to conform or close shop. Some journalists have fled the country because of threats to their lives. A new regime is now in power with early signs of relaxing the clampdown, but it is too early to shower accolades.
In Ethiopia, the situation slowly deteriorated over the last few years as the media was increasingly targeted for offering truthful accounts of emerging political events and conflicts in parts of the country. The current civil war in the Tigray region has now spilled over, not just across the country, but also into the media, sucking in many journalists resulting in a dearth of independent reporting.
The Ethiopia case is special. When the current Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali took office on April 2, 2018, there was optimism that the country would undergo political metamorphosis. This optimism was based on the fact that immediately he took over, Dr Abiy released from prison journalists, bloggers, opposition politicians and other ‘political’ prisoners. He unbanned websites and allowed greater freedoms, including that of the media. The return of exiled politicians and journalists to the country, and the appointment of one-time government and ruling party opponents to important positions in government evidenced the changes. The appointment of, for example, Birtukan Mideksa, an opposition leader, who had just returned from exile, to head its election body, the National Electoral Board of Ethiopia, was seen as a watershed moment in the country’s troubled political history.
However, only years after taking over power, and a year after winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, Dr Abiy’s Ethiopia witnessed the return of conflict, with serious fighting in the Tigray region, which has apparently killed hundreds of people and displaced thousands of others. Other regions are also experiencing unrest. While early political changes seemed promising, the media is again under threat and the country is in a state of flux, given the rising authoritarianism and ethnic tensions. To paraphrase the saying, the first casualty of conflict is the truth. Accordingly, by suppressing the media and journalists, Ethiopians and the international community are unable to get the truth from the ground. What’s more, there are fears that further clampdown would be perilous for journalists and the media, posing serious threats to democracy and human rights, regional peace and stability.
It is therefore clear that the socio-economic and political context impacts newsroom safety significantly, and journalists need to take a long-term view and deploy measures to protect their space.
Muthoki Mumo, the CPJ’s sub-Saharan Africa representative, has observed disturbing trends that put media freedom at risk in the eastern Africa region. She finds that the fight against misinformation and disinformation has been used as a pretext to retaliate against critical journalism.
“In East Africa, newspapers have been shuttered in Tanzania and journalists detained, including in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Rwanda-- all on allegations of having aired or published information deemed false by authorities. This is a worldwide trend,” Mumo says.
She notes that data from CPJ Prison Census, a snapshot of all journalists imprisoned as at December 1 each year, shows that the number of journalists jailed worldwide on false news charges has been on the rise (1) over the last several years - from at least 10 journalists in 2015 (2) to at least 34 in 2020 (3).
The second question speaks to the sustainability of independent journalism in the region. Journalism can be fed using a variety of methods. The critical journalism in the region has mostly been supported by advertising. We have seen experimentation with public journalism, privately-owned commercially supported, dalliance with philanthropy, and lately the entry of audience revenue. Nearly all journalists in the region have been trained and weaned on either state-funded or privately-owned commercially funded contexts.
All the other modes come with unfamiliarity with loads of the unknown for newsroom independence in the region. A slowing down of advertising revenues has meant that all forward-oriented media houses must experiment with the new business models, lessons shared across media houses and across national boundaries would help quick adaptation.
Ethiopian journalist Te'amrat G. Gebremariam sees the challenges as partly global, given that the business model on which journalism was based is in turmoil. “I believe journalism is a casualty of an institutional decline (economically) and cultural war for it is a civic institution. The lesson is to rethink the value of journalism as content from the platforms. Its business model is not as viable as had been the case for the last two centuries. The reinvention of sustainable business models through which journalism as content continues to thrive, is the key. We have to restore trust and credibility in the content we deliver.”
Gebremariam advances the establishment of a private-public hybrid model. He proffers that redefining journalism as an economic and civic institution for society is a tall order. But one we have to figure out how to do. He says: “We are in the attention economy, competing with forces much broader and wider than the traditional fronts. The media industry is faced with economic, cultural and technological challenges. The ecosystem of news has been disrupted. Journalism, as a product for public good, is doubted. The tide is so large and high, recovery requires a new business model, one in which a hybrid of commercial and taxpayers' funds play. Articulating the legal, institutional and policy instruments for the advancement of the public-private hybrid model could be the way forward.”
Huge dilemma here. Recently, the chairperson of the Media Owners Association in Kenya, Stephen Gitagama, went public that journalists must take the lead in figuring out how the independent news media reconfigures its business model and survives the strong waves.
Speaking at the Aga Khan University’s Graduate School for Media and Communications in Nairobi on June 22, 2021, Mr Gitagama said; “media freedom must remain supreme regardless of all the challenges that the media industry has been experiencing. We need to have more journalists leading media houses".
The third question speaks to professional excellence. With the democratisation of information, brought about by widespread digital access, it became instructive that journalism must, of necessity, do more than inform merely on events and announcements to stay relevant. In an infodemic world, attention spans have grown a lot shorter and perceptive audiences choosier.
This, naturally, has demanded journalists to exert expertise in their chosen beats. How then, should we train for the industry and what characteristics should define excellence? Those in academia are wrestling with this question, if the new programmes are anything to go by. Professional associations, too, must therefore play a more visible role in nudging and driving peer review and performance geared at evolving standards. We, therefore, must seek clever ways to enjoin the academy and the industry, and to encourage journalistic research.
Editorial leadership is critical for this to happen. Even though the place and roles of journalists and the media is under intense scrutiny, editors have always sought to provide the information society needs to effectively participate in public life. As gatekeepers, editors have to balance society’s needs and those of the media, ensuring that information is palatable, relevant and useful to society, but also ensuring that professional and journalistic integrity is maintained at all times. Despite these important roles editors play, their positions are increasingly under scrutiny, especially from political actors intent on strangling the media space. We need to see the forest, not just the trees, and collaborate where it matters to enable innovation.
The fourth question speaks to the need for an enabling legal and policy framework that define a pro-independence regulatory approach. In all the eastern Africa countries, the State has found both subtle and overt ways to seek to influence editorial content. Examples abound from centralised booking of public sector advertisement to direct threats and incarceration.
Many of our countries still have the media being regulated by the State, totally unrecommended. The ideal is self-regulation, even though it has monumental practical difficulties in most of eastern Africa. The coregulatory model, where the State and industry contribute in setting up a regulator – as the Media Council of Kenya – instead has been seen as sufficiently effective with inbuilt checks and balances to ward off overreach by either party. However, given that the media context is always evolving, there is a need for stronger public participation in the regulation and the development of a more robust media criticism.
CPJ’s Mumo says governments in the region are also increasingly legislating to curb freedom of speech online: Tanzania’s broad and vague Online Content Regulations, not only make it expensive to blog or to run a YouTube channel, they also effectively prohibit critical reporting on a number of subjects, from political demonstrations to natural disasters. In Uganda, CPJ documented how Uganda Communications Commission selectively deployed (4) online registration rules in 2019, to target the Daily Monitor (5) after reporting that did not sit well with those in power.
She observes a growing trend of Internet restrictions during times of political tension, as recently seen in Ethiopia (6), Uganda (7), Tanzania (8), and Burundi (9). Restricting Internet access makes it difficult for journalists to report safely on matters of public interest, and also robs citizens of their rights to access information.
The legislative and regulatory context has been lately skewed in some countries to allow for targeting of journalists who appear independent. Mumo cites the use of restrictive accreditation rules to limit access for both the international and local journalists. Officials recently used accreditation barriers in Uganda (10) and Tanzania to make it very difficult for the international press to cover elections. Uganda’s guidelines on the registration of local journalists further seemed designed to create confusion among the local press, weeks before January’s General Election. In Ethiopia, a critical international reporter had his credentials revoked and was expelled (11) from the country in May.
An option is for journalistically-literate voices outside the newsroom to get louder in reviews and criticism both of news media performance and of regulatory actions at all levels. The thinning newsrooms, arising from the exit of experienced journalists, has seen growing availability of hard-nosed journalists in academia, for example. This lot needs to inject the values of unflinching inquiry and emotion-less delivery to help shore up and grow the profession.
The fifth question – probably the most important – is public trust. A dividend of credible reporting, public trust is what gives the media influence and power to push social transformation. Journalism must teach its audiences to expect verified facts, consistently. That verification does not stop with reporting, it must extend to the styles we apply to demonstrate to our audiences that what we are telling them is fact-based, however unpalatable.
The Trust Project (12) tells us that eight factors drive public trust. That we need to demonstrate that the journalist is an expert on what they are reporting on; that the purpose of the story is transparent; that the sources used in the reporting are made available; that the journalist uses local knowledge; that the story delivers diversity through multiple sourcing; that audience feedback is allowed to flow to the newsroom; that the reporting tactics and methods are transparent; and that the news organisation explains their ownership and standards.
These factors, applied consistently, have been seen to grow public trust. Other principles can come to buttress them. A strong and sustainable media attracts more believability; availability of well-trained and accountable professionals, working in a safe work environment inspires confidence; and a progressive legal framework and a strong supportive structure in society help centralise the public interest.
Seeking to enable and encourage regional solidarity, the Eastern Africa Editors Society (EAES) has worked with other media associations in the region over the last two years to drive discussion on the above issues. The defined goal has been to share experiences and find solutions to existing challenges.
“If these negative trends are not stemmed, we fear that the space for the press in the region will close further. The press and civil society in the region must push back against this creeping repression, including through the courts. We also believe that cross-border solidarity is crucial given that none of these trends are unique to any single East African country,” says Mumo.
The above scenarios do not portend well for the media. Editors, in working to build EAES, seek to find practical, effective and long-lasting solutions to challenges facing journalists in the region, while maintaining solidarity with colleagues suffering political harassment, imprisonment, internment, and fear as a result of their work. The organisation currently has its institutional members in editors’ associations in Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.
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Churchill Otieno is the President of the Kenya Editors’ Guild, which currently chairs the EAES Executive Council.
cotieno@gmail.com
@OtienoC
(1) https://cpj.org/reports/2020/12/record-number-journalists-jailed-imprisoned/
(2) https://cpj.org/data/imprisoned/2020/status=Imprisoned&charges%5B%5D=False%20News&start_year=2015&end_year=2020&group_by=location
(3) https://cpj.org/data/imprisoned/2020/?status=Imprisoned&charges%5B%5D=False%20News&start_year=2020&end_year=2020&group_by=location
(4) https://cpj.org/2019/02/ugandan-regulator-orders-news-website-suspended-an/
(5) www.monitor.co.ug
(6) https://cpj.org/2021/05/journalists-shutdowns-myanmar-ethiopia-kashmir/
(7) https://cpj.org/2021/01/internet-access-cut-social-media-banned-during-uganda-elections/
(8) https://www.accessnow.org/tanzania-internet-shutdowns-victim-stories/
(9) https://cpj.org/2020/05/burundi-blocks-social-media-access-during-presiden/
(10) https://cpj.org/2020/12/journalists-in-uganda-face-accreditation-hurdles-ahead-of-election-risk-criminal-sanction/
(11) https://cpj.org/2021/05/cpj-condemns-ethiopias-expulsion-of-new-york-times-reporter-simon-marks/
(12) https://thetrustproject.org/trusted-journalism
