By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi After Premium Times’ over-the-top but nonetheless admirably ethical and well-inte...
By Farooq A. Kperogi,
Ph.D.
Twitter:
@farooqkperogi
After Premium Times’ over-the-top but nonetheless admirably ethical
and well-intentioned apology and firing of its reporter for reporting, without
verification, a certain Danladi Ciroma’s coldhearted justification for the Plateau
massacre, a motley crowd of incorrigibly peevish government apologists looking
for a convenient diversion from the gross incompetence of the government seized
on the apology like a drowning man clutches at every twig and worked themselves
into a pitifully maniacal feeding frenzy on the Nigerian news media.
Some even went so far as to self-righteously wail that
Premium Times’ apology won’t bring back the people who died as a result of its
inaccurate reporting! Seriously? You have to truly take leave of your senses—if
you had any to begin with—to assume that it was the reporting of Ciroma’s
alleged justification for the savage mass murders of Berom farmers that ignited
the equally unjust, barbaric murders of innocent Muslim travelers along Bauchi-Jos
road.
Retaliatory murders are an abiding feature of communal
conflicts in Nigeria. I covered several of them when I was a reporter. The
perpetrators of these murders don’t need any prodding from the media to give
vent to their bloodthirsty urges. It’s unforgivably simplistic to think that
the news media are all-powerful, irresistible social syringes that inject
thoughts and attitudes into people with immediate and dramatic effect.
In any case, this is not the first time Miyetti Allah’s
officials have been reported in the media to have justified, claimed
responsibility for, or issued threats of, mass murders, which, to my knowledge,
they have never denied. For instance, on January 4, 2018, chairman of Benue
State’s Miyetti Allah, Garus Gololo, told the BBC that the mass
murder in Benue was a retaliation for the theft of 1,000 cattle. As far as I
know, Gololo hasn’t disowned this interview. How was that different from what
Ciroma was alleged to have said?
The Nation,
incidentally Bola Tinubu’s newspaper, which originally published the quotes
attributed to Ciroma, hasn’t repudiated its story, much less apologize for it.
In fact, Yusufu Aminu Idegu, the Nation’s
reporter who spoke with Ciroma, insists that his reporting was faithful to what Ciroma actually told him during a
phone interview, and his paper stands by him.
Interestingly, Ciroma admitted that he DID SPEAK with the
reporter. He only said he was misquoted. “I told the reporter that leaders at
the local and national levels should come together and resolve this crisis
before it is too late,” he told Premium Times on June 29, 2018. So people who said the Nation’s reporter “fabricated” the interview, which other
newspapers, including Premium Times, published are the real duplicitous fabricators.
Not even Ciroma says the interview was fabricated.
From my experience as a journalist and as a journalism
teacher, I can bet my bottom dollar that Ciroma only recanted the interview
because of the massive backlash it instigated. Had Gololo’s own interview with the
BBC inspired a similar pushback, he might have denied it as well. This is an
all-too-familiar media stratagem.
And it isn’t just Nigerian public figures and public
officials who traffic in this. For instance, sometime in 2012, the mayor of my
city here in the US sued me and one of my final-year journalism students who
wrote a story for our class website based on a speech I invited the mayor to deliver
to my students. During the Q and A session, the mayor got carried away and
talked about a certain "shady" land developer's unacceptable ethical
infractions without mentioning his name. My student put the pieces together and
was able to identify who the "shady" developer was. She interviewed
the developer and wrote her story.
The mayor sued and said my student made up the story.
(Politicians say this everywhere when they get into trouble for what they say).
Thankfully, we had the full video recording of his talk, which we uploaded on
our class website. The developer's lawyer found the video recording and brought
it to the mayor's attention. That was the end of the story.
I should point out that what the Nation reporter did, that is, sharing his report with his
colleagues from other media houses, is not unusual, either. It’s called pack
journalism, and it happens even here in the United States. I hate it, but it is
what it is.
People who know nothing about journalism are also saying
that the Nation reporter’s admission
that he did not record his interview with Ciroma somehow invalidated his claims
to have accurately reported him. In journalism, it is perfectly ethical and
even legal to write a news story from unrecorded interviews. In fact, it is
legal to write a story and even reconstruct quotes from memory so long as the
quotes are consistent with what the interviewer says. Google Janet Malcolm and
read up on her case with a psychoanalyst who sued her for attributing quotes to
him that he said he never uttered. She won. Of course, I always tell my
students to record their interviews AND take notes because most politicians
will dispute a story when it provokes an unanticipated backlash.
In all of this, what galls me is the utter hypocrisy of
ignoring the presidency’s own prejudicial statement on the Plateau massacre and
pretending that Ciroma was accused of saying something that was unheard of. The
presidency basically said almost the same thing that Ciroma is now disclaiming.
This was how the presidency traced the trigger for the bloodletting in Plateau
in an official statement: "According to information available to the
Presidency, about 100 cattle had been rustled by a community in Plateau State,
and some herdsmen were killed in the process." That statement isn't
substantively different from what Miyetti Allah's Ciroma was supposedly falsely
quoted to have said: that the carnage was a retaliation for the theft of 300
cows. Will the presidency also have the decency to apologize, like Premium
Times did, for disseminating “falsehood”?
If newspapers had cast headlines based on the press release
from the presidency that went something like: "Plateau: death of 200
people retaliation for theft of 100 cattle--Presidency" it would have been
accurate and would have stoked the same outrage that the quote attributed to
Ciroma did. Remember that headlines are not designed to capture everything the
body of a story contains because they can’t; they simply function to invite the
reader to discover the content.
The presidency's statement was issued a day after the crisis
when tempers were still high and before an official investigation was
conducted. That's not how to de-escalate conflict. If the presidency is
efficient enough to know the cause of the conflict only one day after it
occurred, it should have used that almost prescient prowess to forestall it so
that it won't be in the business of apportioning blames and pointing out who
started what first before official investigations. Every government's ultimate
goal should be to save lives.
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