SWAZI JOURNALISTS AND FREEBIES

Cell phone company MTN is certainly getting hectares worth of free publicity in the Swazi newspapers.

The Times of Swaziland on Friday (15 February 2008) devoted a page to a free trip its managing editor Martin Dlamini had taken to the AFCON football tournament in Ghana at the phone company’s expense. The Times thought the ‘report’ was so important it cancelled the managing editor’s regular Just Thinking column of comment on current events to make room for it.

This gave readers the chance to be told by Martin that he stayed in a five-star hotel and attended a gala dinner. He was also given E500 (about 75 US dollars) worth of free MTN airtime.

Martin got a bit too excited. He told his readers that he was one of the privileged few ‘to be granted an exclusive audience’ with the MTN Group President. Someone should remind Martin that ‘audiences’ are granted by monarchs and emperors, not mere businessmen.

Martin was not alone on the trip. I reported on Friday how the Chief Editor of the Swazi Observer Musa Ndlangamandla took four pages of his newspaper to report on his free trip to the AFCON football tournament in Ghana. Musa was like a child let loose in a toy shop. He seemed especially pleased that he was given a room to himself in a hotel.

I made a lot of fun of Musa on Friday but there is a serious point about all this freeloading the Swazi media have been doing with MTN.

Journalists are supposed to be representatives of their readers (or listeners or viewers) and to do this job well they need to be independent of the people or organisations they report about. With this independence comes credibility. When journalists take gifts, holidays, free airtime, lunches or other ‘freebies’ they destroy their credibility.

Many news organisations across the world forbid staff to any ‘freebies’, even relatively small items like free tickets to concerts or sports events.

In Swaziland the Swaziland National Association of Journalists Code of Conduct is silent on freebies, but Article 3 on professional integrity does state that journalists should avoid conflicts of interest and should not accept bribes.

I don’t think that the free trips at MTN’s expense with fine meals and free airtime amount to ‘bribes’ but the acceptance of freebies by the journalists does compromise their objectivity, or, at the very least, appears to.

See also
‘SWAZI OBSERVER’ GRAVY TRAIN