MEDIA practitioners, especially those in the provinces, should be thinking about their influential role and professional exercise they will do during elections, like the forthcoming May 10 polls, for instance.
In this time of modern technology and the emergence of new means of information distribution and internet blogs, no doubt, community journalists by now have that wide-ranging reporting skills and reporting elections is much like reporting anything else.
But recently, somewhere, if not in our provincial doorstep, while the election campaign season is well under way, we cannot help but notice that media demeanor, especially in inculcating adequate information about the policies of candidates and parties and the election process is somewhat out of order, we mean, full of reproach or inconvenient. Simply put, out of impact.
Sometimes, there’s this abuse of the use of media, which may have prompted news organizations like the KBP and the NUJP call for a certain, significant degree of regulation.
Some media practitioners, moonlighting for political parties and candidates carry out unfair coverage and biased commentaries going below the belt. Hearing them on air crave for a serious concern for accurate, neutral and dispassionate information, where dirty and personal annotations should have been absent.
We admit that parties and candidates are entitled to use the media to get their messages across to the electorate. It may be also apt to own up that media organizations failed in telling off their members or that rules were relaxed in allowing other people like block timers to just say anything they like without censure. It is now up to the electorate to scrutinize the whole election process without the aid of media. At the end of the day, we cannot judge ourselves being able to carry out our duties responsibly.
Eldred Cole, in her article entitled “The Blurring Lines Between Media and Politics,” explains that there is that huge responsibility of every media person to do what he could do to help change the political scenery in the country and that a media person’s job is nobler than that of the politicians. Why else are they shooting journalists than politicians? Media, therefore, should not let politicians overrule them. To be in the media is a privilege, Cole is right. Politics and politicians are just stories, not our lifeline.
In this time of modern technology and the emergence of new means of information distribution and internet blogs, no doubt, community journalists by now have that wide-ranging reporting skills and reporting elections is much like reporting anything else.
But recently, somewhere, if not in our provincial doorstep, while the election campaign season is well under way, we cannot help but notice that media demeanor, especially in inculcating adequate information about the policies of candidates and parties and the election process is somewhat out of order, we mean, full of reproach or inconvenient. Simply put, out of impact.
Sometimes, there’s this abuse of the use of media, which may have prompted news organizations like the KBP and the NUJP call for a certain, significant degree of regulation.
Some media practitioners, moonlighting for political parties and candidates carry out unfair coverage and biased commentaries going below the belt. Hearing them on air crave for a serious concern for accurate, neutral and dispassionate information, where dirty and personal annotations should have been absent.
We admit that parties and candidates are entitled to use the media to get their messages across to the electorate. It may be also apt to own up that media organizations failed in telling off their members or that rules were relaxed in allowing other people like block timers to just say anything they like without censure. It is now up to the electorate to scrutinize the whole election process without the aid of media. At the end of the day, we cannot judge ourselves being able to carry out our duties responsibly.
Eldred Cole, in her article entitled “The Blurring Lines Between Media and Politics,” explains that there is that huge responsibility of every media person to do what he could do to help change the political scenery in the country and that a media person’s job is nobler than that of the politicians. Why else are they shooting journalists than politicians? Media, therefore, should not let politicians overrule them. To be in the media is a privilege, Cole is right. Politics and politicians are just stories, not our lifeline.