LETTER TO XEXEMUZE Dear Xexe, I am totally convinced that politicians and corporate executives only pretend they want knowledgeable journalists, but in reality they prefer to deal with ignorant journalists who would only take their lies and half truths and publish without asking critical questions. In order not to be baselessly accused of taking on the talk masters we have at leaders of this country, let me keep my illustration to my personal experience with corporate executives in both the recent and far past. The incidents I will talk about involved people I consider as friends but they played propagandists because of their work on those occasions. I remember when I used to work with GNA, I went to an editors forum organized by MTN. Obviously because telecoms writing is my passion. During that meeting, the then Corporate Services Executive of MTN (not Cynthia Lumor) accused journalists of not asking the critical questions. At the time we were discussing the impact of certain regulations on the industry. I thought she may be right, but there were equally critical questions that needed to be asked of the telcos themselves. Back in the my office, Xexe, I wrote a set of critical questions and mailed it to her for answers. They acknowledged receipt after about two reminders within that week, and for the next two months I did not hear from them, despite the several reminders. After several failed attempts to get answers l decided to do an article with the headline MTN EVADE CRITICAL QUESTIONS AFTER CALLING FOR THEM. Xexe, I sent them the headline of my story and gave them a reminder of what their CSE said and the questions they have evaded. Within minutes of sending that mail I got a call from one staff of the department pleading with me to hold on for her to try and get me answers to my over two months old questions. Well, till date I am still waiting for the answers. And you can imagine how many more critical questions I have sent to them, even under this new CSE and they have simply failed to answer. And yet they do forum after forum and paint a nice picture about themselves and expect us to go work as extensions of their PR outfits and publish the good stories only. So you see, are they really interested in the critical questions or they only want it to be directed to the regulator when it suits them, Xexe? Incident number two; just recently I was at a Tigo function and I asked a few critical questions. In answering my questions the Executive told two untruths, which several other journalists probably did not know were untruths. In my bid to probe further, the gentleman (who is my friend) got peeved and walked out of the interview. But he could not walk out of my report because I was going to report his falsehood and expose him. Ei Xexe, by the way we have been accused of reporting only falsehood as journalists. So you see, for those of my colleagues who do not know the truth, they will report the falsehood from this gentleman and be accused as journalists who report falsehood. The gentleman said Tigo is the only telco which is close to covering all district capitals with 3G. But that is not true because MTN completed it December 2013. Tigo is not even done yet. Secondly, he said Tigo voice customers have been increasing month on month from the beginning of the year, but the truth is between January and June they have lost over 24,000 customers. My point is, Xexe, he was not interested in my critical questions even though he pretended he was. He rather had the nerve to tell me to go check my facts before coming to ask him those questions. He would rather that as journalists, we kept quiet and allowed him to brag on so we can go do PR for him and his company. Critical questions were too uncomfortable so he was not interested. So Xexe, let those who say 90% of what we publish are falsehood go back and look at the sources of those information and check if they themselves are credible. They are happy to direct journos to places were they can find critical information suitable for them. But when you ask them critical questions which are uncomfortable, they dodge. I have sent several questions to some telcos. Some of them very critical and about their conduct. I usually copy several persons within each telcos. But till date, like my wife would say, Mui. Dont let us pretend we like knowledgeable journalists. For greater part of the time we dont. We only want journos who know just enough to fight our selfish course, but not enough to question our own conduct. There you have it Xexe. This is where I go Mui for now.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 16:41:47 +0000