HOW THE NIGERIAN MEDIA TRIED TO RETELL THE #ENDSARS PROTEST
THE SLEW OF CONTORTED INFORMATION MEDIA OUTLETS TRIED TO TWIST THE TRUTH WITH
It was supposed to be an online noise making session, a trending hashtag that’d last for a few hours before everything returns to normal. The script was set; it is an old script we all know too well: the anger starts to boil for a few minutes and cools off. But, the people decided to go against the hand.
However, one side that stuck diligently to script is the media. They adhered to the propaganda script we had always known them for, only that this time, unlike before where they kept silent, they stood at the forefront of reporting contrasting news, twisting and contorting the happenings to suit their biased narrative.
The recent #ENDSARS protests across the country have opened our eyes to Nigerian youths' 'flip-scripting' abilities. People no longer follow established orders. Instead, they change what should be, how it should be, and how long it should last.
On the 8th of October, the youths moved the protest from a trending hashtag on Twitter to the streets; many of the older generation, the politicians whose primary purpose is to frustrate Nigerian youths, gobsmacked. They hoped that the protest would last for a few days, but they were met with resistance stronger than they envisaged.
Knowing how powerful media is and how it shapes narratives, the government, in a smart chess move to thwart protesters' efforts, ordered media houses to keep mum about the happenings.
I am privileged to be an "upcoming" intern for a media house in Jos. On the second day of the protest, I overhead the OAPs discuss how they had been ordered not to talk about the complaint on air. One of the OAPs said that as a journalist, they were not to take sides. Remaining neutral, she explained, was a central tenet of journalism.
“But how about talking about it, bringing it to the consciousness of the people?” somebody asked.
“We can’t. we have been ordered not to overtly talk about the protest.”
While the news was hard for me to take, I tried to understand why NBC would be sceptical about media houses reporting the protest. Maybe they don't want to raise the fears of people, I reasoned.
But little did I know that the "neutrality" they were preaching was cloaked in "government support." It was not a "neutrality" that stopped you from reporting the protest; it was a neutrality that prevented you from telling the truth as it is; objectivity that permitted you to paint peaceful protesters as the rotten eggs, the ones who should be feared, and not the gun-wielding men on black.
This rude-awakening truth smacks me hard on the face when I saw a tweet from TVCnews saying that "angry protesters and police clashed in Lagos." The headline was as misleading as the president is. The story's body explained that protesters had a "clash" with police officers trying to manage the situation. The language used by this 'reputable' media house pitched the protesters as the bad ones, the ones who were rowdy, violent, and the police were the calm ones, the people whose only aim was to maintain peace and order.
Someone who isn't in Nigeria and hasn’t been following the happenings on Nigeria’s social media space might be tempted to think protesters were violent.
But the reverse is the case. Protesters have been peaceful, going about their protests with decorum. The demonstrations' level of organization, protesters' civility, even when police officers came to protest grounds with heavily-loaded guns, has been impeccable.
The media's silence was called out for the bullshit that it was. And rightly so. Many people on Twitter called on major news stations to report the news, case in point ChannelsTv.
The outcry from the Nigerians was becoming too much for the Media to feign silence, so ChannelsTv, in a bid to placate the cries, reported the protests under their entertainment news. Yes, protesters in major cities in the country were entertainers. Jokers. Comedians who shouldn’t be taken seriously.
As if that was not enough, another TV station, HipTv, was allegedly temporarily shut down when they reported their station's protests. Somebody tweeted how in the middle of a report, his Tv went black. When broadcasting returned some minutes later, there was no news on the protest. Music videos replaced the protest videos. Who needs those videos anyway? The country is okay. We are fine. Let's talk about other things instead, other vital things.
Channels Tv and TVC are two major news outlets whose sole aim since the protest started is to distort the truth and present peaceful protesters as evil and violent people.
Because why else would channels Television show the video of a man who claimed to be representing the Nigerian Civil Society group say that Nigerian protesters were being violent and have been attacking police officers?
It makes no sense that neutrality means taking the side of the government, twisting the narrative to suit their selfish agenda. It begs to reason that media houses would rather have gullible and thieving government officials speak about the protest than talk to the aggrieved people.
The media and the government failed to realize that maybe they have but are still living in self-denial – is that traditional media houses are becoming as redundant as the audio promises they make. They have been sleeping on a bicycle for too long that they didn't see how powerless the media houses they spend millions of nairas to buy have no real power.
The internet has made traditional media houses powerless.
While journalists at these television stations and radio stations sat in a meeting for hours deliberating on what lies to tell the world, racking their brains to come up with good enough propaganda to feed the world, young people curate and distribute their truth online.
Magazines, blogs, podcasts, news outlets – all owned and run by young people who don't depend on government hand-me-downs to thrive are at the forefront curating the truth, our history.
The plans of these media houses are dead on arrival. They have lost the power to tell lies. We can now speak our truth. We can now write our history.
As the protests are going on in different cities, videos and images are being distributed in real-time. Every protester is either on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram or WhatsApp, or Snapchat sharing their experiences. The number of independent young people who run media outfits that are on the ground to cover the event far surpasses what these other media houses will have.
We are taking back our power, our narrative. The slew of lies media houses has lined up to tell the international community pales compared to the millions young Nigerians have. We are our own journalists, our own reporters, our own historians. Your propaganda will never work. Na we dey run am.