As the world becomes more enshrouded in conflicts, wars, injustices, controversies and hair-splitting, questions on how journalists work and the media’s capacity to provide accurate, reliable and timely information on human rights abuses which is the major trade mark of strife, are becoming paramount. There is higher demand for better space in the media and concrete reportage of rights-based issues like torture, extrajudicial killings, female genital mutilation, child rights abuse, human trafficking, tribalism, religious intolerance, refugees, immigration, unemployment, sexual and racial discrimination, and editorial counselling good governance in the face of social imbalance and injustice.
The moral doctrine of human rights prescribes the fundamental prerequisites for each human person to lead a minimally good life.They are international norms in the sense that they transcend national boundaries, that help to protect all people everywhere from whether political, legal, or social abuses. They are inherent and inalienable rights due to human beings, regardless of their nationality, place of residence, sex, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, language, or any other status. The human rights, among others, include the right to freedom of religion; the right to freedom of expression and association; the right to a fair trial when charged with a crime; the right not to be tortured, and the right to engage in political activity. These rights exist in morality and often guaranteed by law at the national and international levels, in forms of treaties, customary international laws, general principles and others. They are immutable but not absolute in the sense that like every other right, they stop where other person’s own begins.The various declarations and legal conventions in the past 50 years, whether the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948); the European Convention on Human Rights (1954); International Covenant on Civil and Economic Rights (1966) or the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, have specified goals drawn from the human rights.
Nigeria, on its part, is signatory to several international human rights treatises, including the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1967); the Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees; the Convention on Political Rights of Women (1953 and Punishment of Crime of Apartheid (1981) and African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (1981). Nigeria also ratified the slavery Convention 1926, the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery 1956 and the 1949 Geneva Conventions Relative to the treatment of prisoners of war and protection of civilian persons in time of war. However, it has not signed the Convention on Prevention and punishment of crime of genocide; the international covenant on Civil and political rights (1966); the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) or the Covenant against Torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatments or punishment.
It is from these human rights that the media derived its authority. In fact, the relationship between the media and human rights is symbiotic. While the right to free press is captured in the Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the media owe it as a duty to promote the tenets of human rights and campaign against its violation. What the media gains from human rights it also gives to it. While the media draws authority and protection from these principles, it is also expected to give life and sustenance through awareness to these rights. This is because increased awareness about human rights is the first and foremost necessary step to stopping human rights abuses. Protection of human rights is very vital for the sustenance of peace and it is hence the work of the media to highlight interfaces between human rights and activities of the state or individuals. The more people know and care about human rights, the more they are empowered to defend their own rights. Also the more they are inspired to defend others’ rights. The mass media’s highlighting of incidences of right abuse will force the government and civil society to improve on their practices.
Consequently, living in an information age makes the media, which is the harbinger of information, the centre of the universe; in that every other human activity revolves around it as a major information source. It is media activities that largelycreate the information revolution of our time. Also known as the fourth state power, the media in many ways steers the informational component of the world. It is the most effective avenue for creating awareness and acceptance, which is the major step in every human endeavour. It must be acknowledged that spreading message via schools, religious houses, ceremonies, clubs, and community fora can be quite effective in reaching hundreds or even thousands, but their efficiency is a far cry from what the media can do. Modern journalism, which came from the pamphleteers and those who wrote leaflets and papers, often against unjust laws in the 18th and 19th centuries, reach wider audience and in more organised and often comprehensive manner with analysis and even provision for feedback. This singular role should be good to the human rights region. From the print, broadcasting or the new age media, into which the internet falls, information has become handy, breaking sovereignty barriers and transcending landscapes. Hence, it has wider reach and spreads for largest number of people in short period. The mass media has become the singular channel to not only spread but democratise information, create awareness and even ignite revolution in both ideas and actions.
A free and impartial media is hence the key and pillar to human rights watch, as it helps to spread informed views and opinions. In relation to human rights, the media is tasked with serving a range of functions: holding power to account on the protection and punishment of rights abusers; encouraging citizens’ participation and providing a forum for diverse views. This tripartite function of the media provides the life wire for sustenance of peace in the society, which can never be alienated from respect to people’s rights.
It is trite, however, to appreciate the challenges journalists encounter in discharging this enormous responsibility. Globally, information on human rights is often subject to constant struggle in the public sphere and is usually the intersection of many actors’ interaction, including governments, non-governmental and inter-governmental organisations, public relation firms and other interest groups, and other media. Most of the human right abuses have linkages with the government or its agencies, the rich and powerful in the society, who are often the media owners or give impetus to other media owners who may run out of business or fail to satisfy their capitalist instinct, if this clandestine relationship is not nourished through lopsided journalism.
The result is the array of interests making the struggle of the media to remain unbiased more intense. There is the consequent problem of systematic editorialising and inability to effectively deal with the velocity of news coverage on the part of the editors, who might be in a fix in selecting what is newsworthy but won’t cross the path of vested interests of media owner.
In a bid to retain his job, reportage, editing and editorialising might be done outside the imperatives of journalism – truth-telling, independence and awareness of the impact of words and images on society.It is actually this need to present a story as a purely an unbiased observer that is the major challenge of the media practitioners. And it has emerged as evident in what obtains in Nigeria today, no matter how the journalist tries, there is always an element of bias as the scope for reliable and accurate reporting is often defined by the identity, objective and character of the media themselves.
The media itself, as aforementioned, finds it difficult to extract its independence from overbearing politicians that are not just the major culprits of human rights abuse, but also the financiers of the adverts, lectures, luncheons and award ceremonies of the media. This could be regarded as political and commercial pressure, home-grown bias, prejudice and manipulation besieging truth telling in the media. Thus we have in Nigeria, media outfits that have been struggling to convince the populace that they are national and not regional media outfits, or that they are not owned by a particular political party. While they acknowledge this in the portion of their publication, people still call them northern, eastern ororwestern papers, because that is what their content portrays.
That is to say to a large extent, it is not the expertise of the editors or the editorial boardsthat determine what forms the headlines you see on the newspapers and electronic media, nor is it their sweat that define the modern editorial culture. They would have liked it so but outside media ‘sponsors,’ there is a surge of lobbyists as our democracy gets more interesting. As politics generally pays more and the electorate become more aware of their rights and what they want from their leaders, the burden becomes much on the journalists and their consciences, who by merely following the ethos of their professions, are the watchdogs of human rights implementation. The politicians and governments have unofficially instituted the corporate lobbyists in the name of public relations, whichfeed the media with messages that suit vested interests of their masters. The tidal wave of pre-packaged information often handed out as press releases, statements and communiqués threatens to overwhelm journalism in Nigeria.
Many media houses are afraid of going against the mighty through concrete information at their disposal for the fear of frivolous and endless litigations. But this is for those who may go about it in civilised manner. Some governors have kidnapped journalists not for writing falsehood, but for exposing what they would have liked to remain hidden, while not a few have been killed. In 1983, General Muhammadu Buhari regime, noted for abstruse abuse of human rights, went a step further in issuing Decree Number 2 of 1984, which banned the press from publishing whatever his government considered offensive, even though it be truth. Although this decree has been repealed in print, it functions effectively in the mind of civilian governments of the day.
Outside these, the working condition of journalists has made certain evils norms in contemporary Nigeria media industry. Journalists in Nigeria work often in poor, insecure and unprotected social conditions. The young journalists are merely joining a pool of hungry and exploited workforce in a twilight world where there is no secure employment. In fact, many journalists operate from the zone of those denied basic necessities of life and whose rights are not just abused but who have taken such abuse as normal. It won’t be totally wrong to say some journalists do not know what human rights are. To worsen the matter, there is hardly any training or capacity building for the journalists, nor is there any sponsorship for investigative journalism or research. While the journalist may have no option than to wait for the typical ‘brown envelope’ to pay for transportation or feed family, publishing truths offensive to sympathetic agents and allies could cost him/her the job.
In this seeming hopelessness, there is a gradual drift from journalistic activism to that of advocacy. Although, the latter is not a professional flaw as it is rooted in the tradition of free media, but the problem is where the mix fails accommodates influences of story, direction, opinion and conclusion, which are not from the media professionals- the editors- but dictated by interested parties.
But in all these, the hard-nosed, forthright and courageous journalism that tells the human rights stories even when things are falling apart, without evoking sentiments that are unnecessary, is the victor of human rights. Not just because he exposes the ills against human rights, but makes use of the same rights boldly. Nigerian media actually needs to take a leap from the largely discredited ‘development journalism’ where those that bear the name journalists murder the profession for cash or sacrifice professionalism on the altar of keeping the country one or not heating up the polity, in the definition of selfish politicians. When the journalists do these and are clamped down, they become the victims of what they campaign against.
