Eric Wamanji
Every day, culture critics are unease with the content spewing from our electronic media -there is too much sex, sexism and ethnicity. A Martian would be forgiven for imagining that the twain is the most exigent need of our time.
Why pray, can’t we engage in progressive and civil discourse for national development, or better still, why aren’t we engaging in such conversations that will revitalize the media’s former glory of the Fourth Estate?
The reality is that the media, especially broadcast, is not the hallowed agora exhalted for information and idea exchange. Rather, it’s an industry whose interest is to mollify the mass by appealing to the Freudian complexes of primitive desires of sex and sibling (read ethnic) rivalry – for profit.
That is why the diet churned from our FM radio stations is simply sex and ethnicity. The TV girls have elected to broadcast more of their physical anatomy than news. And to paraphrase one culture critique, if you edit sexism from our broadcast media, all will close shop.
It seems the broadcast world is suffering from an acute creativity paralysis. It also points out that our producers, much as they have the instruments of mass communication, lack the intelectual rigor and basic ideological understanding of media and society. Yet, the elite are taking advantage of this to obfuscate us from any critical thinking about society, liberties, resources and governance.
Indeed, it is vital to note that the electronic media, is the neo circus designed to divert the mass from interrogating pertinent societal issues. News is tablodised. It’s a charade. When a news girl is skimpy and dramatic, that’s a sublime strategy to derail the viewer from reflecting on the information. It’s a corruption of the mind. Bodily anatomy is more emphasised than information and the news at 9:00 appeals more to the emotion than intellect.
Then, all our radio stations are ‘SFM’ that is Sex FM as they stretch the frontiers of indecent public discourse, as if every single problem afflicting mankind is pegged on matters sex. This is flawed thinking. It is a circus.
There is no doubt that appeal to sex is a rudimentary way of reasoning. Those who appeal to sex, or induce matters bedroom in discourses are in essence saying, “You know what, my brain is composed of puss.” Yet, does society enjoy sex? Yes, it’s massaging, we all have some pervasion; it’s opiating, it’s easy to manufacture and easy to consume. Do we need sexism for societal growth, no. Society needs thinkers to take the current generation to better echelons. Man shall never live on sex alone.
Ethnic idiocy
On ethnicity, it sells because we hate each. We enjoy the stereotypes because of our complexes that were long constructed by the colonialists, hyped by the politicians and happily replayed by the media. We are simply idiots everytime we focus on ethnic enclaves, ethnic jokes, and persuasion. We also pose ethnic supriority and that idiocy is what the media thrives on.
Yet, it would be foolhardy to imagine that a struggling FM station will seriously champion such critical issues like employment rights, consumer rights, environmental degradation, exploitation, and human rights and so forth when the commercial cheque comes from the same exploiters. Their work is cut out: to retain the status quo of social stratification and attendant exploitation. If the chatterers focus on any serious issue, it’s just a gloss over to create a false of participation.
Furthermore, the media has to construct and manufacture audiences. The bait is sex and stereotypes. The audiences are then packaged as products to be sold to advertisers. Like many production line that do not seek quality for mass produced products, the media has no business giving you quality programming. Its programming of escapist content is meant to snare the audience into a box. The box is then delivered as statistics to the advertiser who attaches a price to it. The rush for ratings is to blame for this.
This explains why radio journalism is dead especially in this part of the world. What we have are clowns who manufacture vicarious and ephemeral laughter that sedates as you get trapped to the bigger game of numbers, ratings and profits. As an audience who laughs at these shows, you are simply a pawn in the game of profits. That is how it works folks.
Of course the patron saints of this kind of reckless ethnic and sex industry, that I’m persuaded, contribute to a paralysis of morality and cohesion, are the advertisers. We sacrifice our national decency, morality and cohesion at the altar of profits.
The trouble
Trouble begins with media ownership. Owners are after profits and ideological interests. Profits in media are easily generated from selling sex, sensation and ethnic antagonism. Ideology is pursued through propaganda. Every day we are witnessing discourses that lean towards the two preceding frames.
Producers too are part of this wider mess. Most of them are products of an education system that is classically an industry whose main interest is to churn mass products, paying little heed to quality.
And so, the practitioner in cahoots with the owner has commoditized media and in turn, society has become one dimensional as Herbert Marcuse would put it.
Yet, as we know it, media is not a classical product. While it follows the same process of industrial production, media products are unique in that they influence our social interaction, orientation and world view. All these are critical elements for a morally upright and democratic society that other products like, say, cooking fat, don’t offer.
Yet, to imagine that your average producer will fathom the complex dynamics of society – its politics, religion, culture, economics and governance – is to demand too much.
As a society also, we harbor extreme homophobic tendencies against our own. This truth of course is a construct of colonialists and a card well played by politicians time and again.
And finally our trouble is with the masses. We are an illiterate society as far as media consumption is concerned. All this coupled by a lethargic and lazy government operative, and you realize that we are easily fattened for slaughter.
The news media is no longer the watch dog and cannot be trusted to institute checks and balances. There is too much influence into the news: from biased and poorly trained journalists, to media owners whose interest is to pursue parochial agendas to the strings pulled by the advertiser who want to keep on exploiting the masses.
And that is why society needs a Fifth Estate that will redesign and re-open the public sphere. That which we called the news media is dying and a new crop of information and idea exchange platform has to emerge in this 21st Century.
The writer is a media & PR consultant; teaches media studies at Daystar University ewamanji@yahoo.co.uk