SWAZI REPORTERS CAN'T EXPLAIN

A workshop held recently in Matsapha gave us some interesting insights into the abilities of Swaziland’s journalists. It also raised a question about whether the kingdom’s newspapers were really concerned with informing people about what is going on around them or simply in making profits for their owners.

The Weekend Observer (13 October 2007) reported its own news editor Ackel Zwane telling the workshop, ‘journalists, whatever their persuasions, always toed the line of the media house owners, whom in most cases, were pursuing profits so they could honour the payroll among other reasons.’

Zwane was speaking at a workshop about how the media reported on climate change in Swaziland.

According to the Weekend Observer, participants at the workshop, who were mostly people who worked in the environmental sector, wanted to know why the Swaziland press and electronic media persistently pursued sleazy and sensational stories. They felt that the Swazi media did not properly cover environmental issues.

In his response Zwane (unintentionally, I suspect) revealed a major weakness of Swazi journalists: they don’t know how to act on their own initiative.

The Weekend Observer reports him saying, ‘But I must say that the “green people” [environmental activists] should know that we cannot be their ambassadors. If they give us press releases that are packed with environmentally friendly terms, we will not be able to decipher them for the man in the street.

‘We are trained to write and not explain the unexplainable.’

In that last statement, (‘We are trained to write and not explain the unexplainable.’) Zwane reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the journalist. Explaining things to people is EXACTLY what journalists should do. I suspect what Zwane is really saying is that he and the people he works with at the newspaper are not able to explain things because they themselves do not understand them. To which a reader is entitled to say, ‘get me a journalist who can.’

If journalists don’t know something, they should find out. Knowing how to find things out and using initiative is as important to journalists as being able to write down and report accurately the words someone has spoken.

Zwane in his response to the workshop also gave a valuable insight into how newspaper journalists in Swaziland actually work.

The Weekend Observer reported him saying that local journalists had to cover almost anything in a bid to meet a quota of a certain number of stories each month that was imposed upon them by media owners. This meant they could not ‘afford the luxury to specialise’ in certain topics, such as the environment.

The point Zwane makes about owners’ attitudes to newspapers in Swaziland is one that deserves a workshop of its own.

We know that in theory at least newspapers should inform people about what is going on around them, explain the significance of the events to them, and give readers the space to debate matters of interest and importance to them. What Zwane seems to be telling us is that none of this matters as long as the owners make profits. Now is the time for the owners to come forward and explain their point of view to us.