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The silent war of the Sierra Leonean media
By Hugh McCullum ¹

Today, the Sierra Leonean media is at a crossroads, as nine years of civil war has forced upon it a new image: that of a media so ill-equipped that we must now admit that its only legitimate image will be defined by its sharply conflicting perspectives. Truth, through the media, has been the first causality of our recent travails. Eager to ensure the defeat of the Revolutionary United Front rebel army led by Foday Sankoh, and to work toward a quick end to the war, the media sold itself to the governments propaganda without noticing it in the least.

Thus on August 19, 2000, the African Champion newspaper claimed: "Loyal Forces Enter Kono" while the New Storm headlined its lead story: "Gov't Forces Enter Kono." Since this has not been the first time for newspapers to claim successes of the ill-disciplined government soldiers over the RUF bandits of Foday Sankoh, the Awoko newspaper of the same day took the liberty of publishing that "RUF Denies Kono Push." Kono, an eastern district rich in diamonds, is 210 miles away from the nation's capital, Freetown, and since 1992 has been hotly contested by rebels and loyal forces. The truth, however, has been that the rebels have always beaten back the advances of government forces. The rebels use diamond proceeds from Kono to buy arms and other logistics. Therefore, aware of its futility in wrestling Kono from the hands of rebels, the government sorted out the most ingenious exit strategy - media propaganda. Sadly, this too has been handled poorly.

Since the start of the war in 1991, newspapers have aided government propaganda machinery by over-exaggerating war claims, such as the number of surrendered rebels long before the Lome peace accord of July 1999. In April of 1999, the Democrat newspaper published that some eleven thousand rebels had surrendered. Prior to this report, the paper had built a reputation for being "exclusively" in possession of records of surrendered combatants, records that, at the end of the day, cannot be otherwise verifiable. Indeed, as is so well known in Sierra Leone, the Democrat's figures hardly add up.

The paper had competitors in this race for the headlines. Between 1991 and the Lome peace accord in 1999, newspapers virtually killed some 80,000 RUF combatants, giving the impression that the war was coming to an end with the possible "extinction" of RUF supporters. This was proved wrong when the RUF entered the city in May of 1997 in the hundreds of thousands with their allies, disgruntled soldiers of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council. Though it took almost nine years to disprove the newspaper stories, it took Sierra Leoneans few seconds to understand what it means to be faced with heartless bandits, machetes in hand, flying the flag of an unwelcome revolution even as an unreliable media builds a basis for disinformation, distortions, and mind conditioning.

The major crisis in the Sierra Leonean media today is to understand what role it would play in the context of a deadly conflict. This weakness in the media has also compromised its capacity to respond to the corruption so rampant today that the media has been co-opted into the putrescence. Financial inducement to affect favorable coverage is now the norm, but political patronage too has been a strong current in steering the direction of coverage.

True, professionalism among media practitioners easily gives way to material and other considerations in a society in which half the media outlets are owned by politicians always fighting to outwit their opponents. This was illustrated on August 21, when the Standard Times newspaper wrote that Sierra Leone's former High Commissioner to the United Kingdom Prof. Cyril P. Foray had been implicated in the sale of the country's building in London. While Parliament was investigating the matter, the Democrat newspaper, partly owned by the accused diplomat's younger brother, wrote how the government was embarking on a political witch-hunt. This media practice of patron defence may satisfy the paper's managers, but it does great disservice to the society by weakening their faith in the system and urging the people to seek extra-legal solutions to problems, the kind of solution that leads to further conflicts, wars and chaos.

Another illustration was the Standard Times edition of July 27, which carried the report that the director of the Social Action and Poverty Alleviation (SAPA), a World Bank sponsored project, has built a sub-standard school for displaced kids, suggesting the cheating and endangering of the lives of the pupils. The paper published documents to support the story. The next day, three other newspapers ran the high academic and job profile of the accused director, presenting her as a victim of circumstances and target of job seekers bent upon destroying her high-earned image. Invariably, such a method of "attack, defend, and collect" journalism has often led to friction and discredit among journalists on one hand, and disregard for the profession by the general populace on the other. And as the Concord Times of August 21 cautioned, "unless and until media practitioners separate their interest from their news stories, it would be very difficult to give the usually required credibility that certain news items deserve, be they political, war or economic stories."

On the whole, it is a tough challenge for the Sierra Leonean society and its press. There is no united position within the profession to push for spirited challenge against this oddity and to help save the core values of the press. A good many media houses refuse to challenge the negative excesses of their colleagues (a case of dogs don't eat dogs) and in the strangeness of this attitude, such media houses have resigned to tolerating the worst attitudes of the political class, especially those who are opposed to the critical sections of the media. On August 19, the Citizen newspaper, taking a middle balance in the highly contested argument over the failure of the Tejan Kabbah government, called for an interim government after March 2001. It wrote, "Those who hold the view that we must not rush to elections come March 2001 are not wrong, and neither are those against the motion. Let the debate continue so that we may be seen to be a democratic state, even if the argument of the proponents may seem nonsense."

1. Hugh McCullum, a Canadin journalist based in Harare and Nairobi, has covered the Great Lakes crisis for several years for various international media.