CBA General Conference - 2004
NEWS AND SPEECHES
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What makes News?
Eddie Iroh Director General, Radio Nigeria
What makes news is contextual. It finds full expression in the cultural and socio-political tradition of a given community. The credibility of news is, of course, extremely important; so is the credibility of the source. However, credibility alone does not make news. The fact that a newspaper reports insider trading in a coportation will not mean that the entire package it publishes is fact. News is much more than a factual account. It is a lot more than what comes into the public domain.
It is natural to expect that governments act in the interest of the citizens. But we often encounter government officials who tenaciously try to keep what they do on behalf of the citizens secret, away from scrutiny of the press and the public. They instead try to tell the people what they think the people want to hear, especially that which puts the government in good light.
I can understand, to some extent, why our government officials are not always in favour of the people's right to know:
- our politics is still rudimentary
- our society is experiencing demographic transition, and therefore quite volatile
- our democratic experiment is fragile
Thus what may make news in the more advanced democracies and more stable societies may not be so in a developing nation. An important insight of modern information theory is that in many respects news is a public good. Just like other public goods, government has an important role in the provision of news, which is of course, information, knowledge and, therefore, power.
In the more stable democracies, human and people's rights have been recognised as fundamental issues, and the media subsequently have popularized the notion of peoples' right to information. The argument against hoarding of information should, therefore, be considered alongside the argument against censorship.
It is in this regard that RADIO NIGERIA last year introduced a new dimension to its news operations with the creation of a HUMAN RIGHTS DESK. The desk goes beyond reporting any abuses of human and people's rights to also produce a weekly slot called "Know Your Rights."
The media have two products: content and advertisement. Although the two are interdependent, they also retain their distinct individual characteristics. But in the real world, news is often what people directly involved would not want to allow others to know about, unless it makes them look good in the public eye. This goes to support the theory of one of my mentors in the media that "News is what someone wants to keep out of print; everything else is advertisement." Advertisement is, therefore, what most government press releases contain.