The draft not getting to the craft
You begin to wonder
what is happening to the journalism profession in Nigeria, with the many
unfortunate events like badly filed reports that make no sense or serve no
purpose than act as space fillers of incomprehensibility.
Then the
Shibboleths of Nigerianese that have become the foundations of Nigerian English
following none of the rules of common English grammar.
Where we are spared
running the gauntlet of inscrutable English, it is verbosity that leaves you marooned
as a castaway from context and reason as to why the writer deigned to put pen to
paper.
Forget the fine art
of fact-checking, proofreading or spellchecking and you end up with a slurry
of a jumble of words produced by any fingered primate typing feverishly at a
keyboard in the miraculous hope of producing a magnificent volume to upstage the
works of Shakespeare.
Whimsical with the unethical
Then we move on to
the ethical issues of journalism, where some are mercenaries for hire ready to
plant a fabrication to favour a cause, a patron or some bias, many refusing to allow
objectivity to get in the way of sensationalism as we have our focus diverted by
the bold and screaming headlines of yellow journalism.
Plagiarism is rife,
the lack of attribution, reference, acknowledgement or recognition of
originality as the race for circulation and any other pursuit means everyone and
anyone is trampled upon without any hope of an apology or restitution for the
misuse of copyright or sources of material.
Which brings me to
the most recent scramble to the nadir of this profession, the fictional
construct of a story about human trafficking, supported and sponsored by
heretofore reputable organisations, at least we have been deluded into thinking
they had any semblance of integrity until now.
We’ve been had too many times
This made me post
a comment on Facebook about the supposed investigative epaulets of Tobore Mit Ovuorie.
“That girl would be
the complete ruin of any semblance of journalism in Nigeria as newspapers
exacerbate this continual fiction of every undercover story appearing to
endanger her life.
She has found an
emotional and sentimental switch on the Nigerian psyche, speak of endangered
life, and we almost always lose the ability to reason and question as we begin
to sympathise and empathise - we have been blackmailed into losing our rational
minds.”
Indeed, she appears
to have found what we as Nigerians are too susceptible to, our lack of
curiosity in the face of consuming activity.
We’ve lost our bearings
Our senses
stimulated by macabre, bizarre and atrocious stories, pictures and videos that drags
our humanity into inurement to the sufferings of others as we feast on what
passes for news when it is mostly gossip, rumour and uncorroborated events.
We race so well
ahead of the truth and the facts that when they eventually catch up with us,
the damage is done as we wait for the next heroin high of another sorry tale of
life in Nigeria.
You then ask, who
would rescue this noble profession of journalism from the dregs of
reprehensible, lying and unscrupulous purveyors of the contemptible? Who?
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