Lincoln University’s celebrated journalism Professor, Richard Keeble, talks of efficks, instead of ethics in journalism, to address the profession’s rapacious neglect of principle in modern practice. For, sometimes, it is difficult to say what is ethical and what is not. How many of us have had to buff up a quote or inflate the importance of a source to hurry a story through the mill to meet a deadline? Have we not relied solely on just a single source without even going back to check before publication? Do we ever check anything after publication until a rejoinder hits us? How effective is the check regime, anyway? Does it bother anybody that very few of us can write shorthand? Can electronic recorders always do the job, even in the court room? Yet, we are permitted, often by own sense of weak of judgement, and sometimes by the tamed judgement of our consumers, to sail along in the business. And to make our efficks appear less ethical, we turn round to churn lots of books in text book format about the Dos and Donts of the trade.
Of course, sometimes, we turn round for all the good reasons. It was refreshingly awful listening to Baby Ansaba spill the beans about his bad stories on the health of then candidate Atta-Mills. But how many of us will survive such an examination if our practices came under the scrutiny of the most benevolent professional ombudsman? Ansaba made it up, like the New York Times’s Jason Blair or the Sky News correspondent who sat in the comfort of his hotel room and manufactured the story of a missile being fired from a submarine. Perhaps, Ansaba’s subject was as not sick as he made him appear. Or he was really very sick and the journalist used his Punch newspaper to punch away any hope of recovery whatsoever, to make him game for his political detractors. And he seemed to have done quite a job on that. Anyhow, he sees it as unethical and has promised to do well to separate his efficks from his ethics in future.
What prompted Ansaba’s confession? Some deep reflection, maybe; or perhaps the journalist assessed his own practice in the light of the trade’s code of ethics, and like any true professional, decided to reappraise his skills. All professionals make mistakes at a point. Most professions, after all, are conspiracies against the laity. But for the journalist, a mistake is always a significant one, because whereas a lawyer’s mistake in the court room affects a few clients, a typo in the print room could cause incalculable losses to an entire reading public, sometimes causing people to commit suicide. So, often the public has the right to expect abnormal quality from the journalist, even if they can afford to look on while a fake doctor operates on pregnant teenagers.
However, if Ansaba made the confession because he is now enjoying free trips to Trinidad and Tobago from the Atta-Mills government, then his behaviour is shameful beyond compare and unprofessional beyond belief. Journalism Professor Kwame Karikari has described him as a fraud and a journalistic crook. The professor told Joy Fm: “Anybody who knows this fellow in the media in the early 90’s and the late 80’s when people were striving to open up the space for free speech and independent and free media knew this guy as a fraud.” He continued that the Punch editor is not somebody that anybody should take seriously and that he is not even worth the attention of radio interviews. He is not worth to be called a journalist, the professor would add.
Who, then, is worthy to be called a journalist? One of Britain’s most important journalists, Andrew Marr, confesses in ‘My Trade-A short History of British Journalism,’ that he settled for journalism after he had failed in every other endeavour, including being denied a job in a second-hand book store. Another English tabloid columnist repeatedly asks why journalists bother to undergo any training at all, because it is a particularly easy profession that does not require a brain more than the size of a peanut to succeed in. Even in our own circles, it was once alleged that (and she denied it) a journalist who once worked for the BBC, advised some Ghanaian youth in the Brong Ahafo region not to bother building a career in journalism. Here in Northern America, where the trade appears very serious, accomplished professionals are not very encouraging when advising university students about the prospects in the trade. In Britain, school authorities and career counsellors were worried that students were signing up for courses in media studies, instead of physics and other intellectually demanding subjects.
So, journalists are eager to shoot themselves in their left foot. And, perhaps, that is because they are always looking for more ‘settled’ avenues to place their right foot. Why has it suddenly become a fad for journalists to complement their skills with knowledge in another area of study, say Law? Is being a journalist not enough? So, even though my colleague and former roommate was a newspaper editor before he became a lawyer, his fellow journalists who report his often laudable contributions to topical issues, are interested in the editor’s legal side. He is often described as a lawyer first, and then a newspaper editor. And frankly, there are times I don’t know who or what he is. Marr has decreed that journalists who stay in the trade to prepare themselves for a career in public relations or advertising have failed downwards. Those who branch off into politics after a while have also failed-but they have failed upwards. It must be enough to be called a good journalist when you don’t belong to a law firm or a PR agency.
Recently, I talked to a young journalist in Ghana who is doing very good, at least judging by our standards. He is seen on television and heard on radio, and is also doing very well in print. I don’t know why I asked him if he was considering further studies, when I knew he was doing very well. Of course, accomplished professionals in every career improve themselves through formal education and other knowledge enhancing workshops. Interestingly, the lad had been thinking about the prospect, but he would complete my thoughts when he said he was considering a programme in policy, law or “something in that line.” Not in journalism? Why? What else is there to learn, when even charlatans who received no training whatsoever are doing equally good?
Because we don’t take ourselves very seriously, other professionals do not. While the journalism fraternity may be appalled with the conduct of Baby Ansaba, who is not a baby in the trade at all, the Ghanaian public are not as angry as the GJA Ethics Committee or the Media Commission. After Professor Karikari’s interview with Joy FM, the comments readers left on myjoyonline.com were surprisingly tilted towards vindicating Ansaba. The contention was that nearly 70% of Ghanaian journalists are just like Ansaba, and while none of them would dare say how dishonest they have been, Ansaba has demonstrated the mark of a true professional by confessing his misconduct. There was also the pervading thought that if the journalism fraternity has always known Ansaba as a fraud since the 1980’s, then why did it take them this long to expose him? Certainly, the disgraced journalist has lots of questions to answer, but he may also have a few questions of his own to ask his questioners. How sane is the practice, anyway?
Now, let’s ask: What exactly did Ansaba lie about? A journalist who claims to have worked with Ansaba in the 1990’s, Akilu Sayibu, even contends that Ansaba is lying about the lies that he said he wrote about the current president. According to Sayibu, it was a fact that then presidential candidate Atta Mills was sick-a fact that was already known to the Ghanaian public. He writes: “Issues about the health of [candidate Mills] got into the media as a leaked text message which was contained in a message Spio Garbrah sent to the Founder of the NDC in 2007. The media picked it up from there including Ansaba. Subsequently then Candidate Mills was interviewed from his sick bed in a South African Hospital by Joyfm and he admitted that he was in South Africa to undergo an operation. How can Baby Ansaba now muster the courage to tell Ghanaians that, he was deceived to lie about the health of President Mills when even it was factual?”
It is important to appreciate the very serious nature of a profession that was once deemed good enough to replace a constitutionally elected government. Who are those who make the journalism profession tick? They are called journalists, and they have not all come from the slither and the chequered past of the struggle for press freedom, where to print was almost as criminal as to rape. These are men with a native nosiness and an urgent, itchy curiosity to search out the truth about the world and report to the people around them. But how truthful are they? Janet Malcolm, an American writer and journalist on staff at the New Yorker Magazine, whittles away the place for the Truth in her famous saying: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying upon people’s vanity, ignorance and loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse…” Does a remorseful Ansaba fit this description?
In the end, what kind of journalist is Baby Ansaba and how does he want Ghanaian journalism to remember him? He may have paid his dues to the fight for press freedom, by daring to stay in the trade after serving a jail term for libel in the 1990s. But for now, he carries the collective burden of his trade on his head. That is his Golgotha!
Benjamin Tawiah, Ottawa, Canada
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