Press Freedom: Ethics first!

World Press Freedom Day was commemorated May 3 across the globe. Press freedom sends different messages and perceptions across the world and in our specific Cameroonian context; the notion of press freedom is still very different to comprehend.

From the sheer point of view of the number of media organizations functioning without any kind of control or simply from the astonishing audacity of content, added to the near-absence of unfenced government control, one can say there is press freedom in Cameroon.

The question however is about what use is made of it. The best illustration of the complexity of the question is best manifested by the recurrent war of words between media practitioners and the National Communication Council, the watchdog set up by government to ensure respect of norms and ethics within the profession, lest it become an arm for the settling of scores between individuals or parties, deviating from the general interest role the press is expected to play in any open society.

Of late, the National Communication Council has attracted the wrath of many practitioners because of the harshness of measures it has had to take in view of the dangerous glide the profession was taking with repeated cases of outright attacks, usually not backed by critical evidence, on the private lives of citizens.

Initially, the Council was made up essentially of government officials or of those perceived to have sympathies with government and by that token, could not have been wholly accepted by professionals all the time in search of new grounds of freedom of expression.

But recent texts extended membership to the private media sector, to the extent that the presence of some of the most outspoken critics in the outfit could serve as guarantee for credibility. But even then, the Council is still being torn to shreds by many media professionals. For how long can we, as a people, continue to live in such a situation of anarchy?

Journalists usually tend to interpret even the most generous and well-intentioned measures by government at surface level and would rather suspect such a measure carried some hidden agenda; otherwise, what can explain this cross wires of sorts between the National Communication Council and a broad section of media practitioners?

Could the disagreement be so because these practitioners were called in to execute laws for which they were never associated in the drawing up phase?

In which case, and in the interest of consensus, it will always be necessary to always associate members of the profession in any text that affect the functioning of their profession. For instance, the NCC is already grumbling over being shoved aside when the recent laws passed in parliament on the new audio-visual landscape were being considered. The Council is arguing that it was statutorily supposed to be consulted for an opinion.

But what is certain is that the presence of a government-conceived regulatory organ will reduce only when the profession shows enough guarantees that it can regulate itself. For now, numerous examples exist to prove that the profession cannot.

Remember all the noble and novel ideas in the Cameroon Media Council, an emanation of the Cameroon Union of Journalists, which literally had a still-birth. And yet it was a joint effort of journalists to put up this structure to serve as a self-regulatory body and a peer tribunal.

The only thing to save the profession from the dangerous glide down to the nadir is a revolutionary return to the brass-stacks: that is, an unconditional respect for ethics.