How Free is Freedom

The word freedom is being thrown around these days as though we’ve all just been to school and have acquired a new word in our vocabulary.

Freedom however, can be looked at from different perspectives and angles. Of course, as pressmen and women we would always want to claim our right to freedom of the press and dwell on it. It makes us feel untouchable. It makes us daring and sometimes rambunctious. For some of us, freedom means do things any which way, without caring about how we do them, or without respect for the other person’s rights to his or her freedom.

When we write, or speak with a string of untruths and falsehoods, when in our publications or broadcasts we denigrate or blackmail people of a tribe, region, nation or persons, we claim it is our right to do so because the press is free. We never sit down to think what effect a demeaning and indecent press can do to a people and country.

“Radio Mille Collines” exercised freedom many years ago in Rwanda. We all know the consequences. A free press as some eminent professors seem to insinuate does not mean an irresponsible press. A free press does not mean going to the gutters to collect dead dogs and expose them in decent places. A free press can never be what Choves Loh calls “Ugly Journalism”.

If my memory does not fail me, anyone who has been to school would have learned that a free and responsible press is one that informs and correctly too; one that does not go about seeking to ridicule its own very backyard. A free, independent and responsible press is one that educates. It is supposed to teach and not abuse. It should moralise, not ridicule or condemn.

It should be critical but not injurious. But when I hear, some so called responsible people who, though not in the profession of journalism, but claim to be experts in the field, say with affirmation that freedom of the press should be without checks and balances, I ask myself whether we are in the same world or right planet. I would love to see or hear the reaction of such people if they should be admonished without verification of the truth.

When a supposedly free and responsible press dwells on rumours, and bad faith, when a supposedly free and responsible press sees only wrongs and never rights, and we acclaim it, we project a profession almost of hoodlums, ruffians, muggers, delinquents, terrorists, or gangsters. Yet I know how noble this profession is and how it has produced decent men and women who exercised their freedom with responsibility. I know decent people I have worked with who have been critical of their society but not with an insulting or injurious word. So where are we?

Why would the clamour for freedom run us mad? Why would the search for freedom make us zombies? Does freedom have any limits? Do we realise, as we talk about rights and obligations, there are also limits to our freedom of expression? Do we know that our freedom is supposed to end where someone else’s begins? Or we do not just care about the wellbeing of our next door neighbour because we claim to be free. Freedom does not mean laissez-faire.

The Moderator of my church, the PCC, the Rt. Rev. Dr. Festus Asana in prefacing the study material for the CWF and CMF in 2014 said “living things grow… good growth requires good nursing. And good growth focuses on liberation.”

A disciplined child grows with the freedom of his or her conscience. A child without control becomes weird, wild, vicious and disrespectful. Discipline should be the watchword in our growth process. And that is what is expected of those who practise in the profession of journalism. Their freedom should be one with much discipline and not with the looseness we experience everyday under the shameful pretext that we have rights that we violate even against ourselves.