Emilly Comfort Maractho
At the time the World Press Freedom Day was agreed on, the dream was to fix media freedom, and everything would fall in line. Freedom was the means to an end, which many believed was the democratic path. It made sense to speak of freedom of the press. Some mature democracies had demonstrated that with a little bit of help from the fourth estate, you could fix a lot and have governments deliver for the people. Just like the debate would rage on if we needed democracy first or development, others believed a free press was good for democracy, and to others still, democracy defined what kind of press we ended up with. What is clearer now is that freedom is important, but it means little for all of us without a real commitment to a justice system that works for all. Where do people run when faced with the challenge of lack of freedom? Where would journalists be if their freedom was severely impaired? Would they get answers? In the aftermath of the recent by-elections in Kawempe, many of us got to a point of despair, wondering if our colleagues, friends, and associates assigned the coverage of that election were safe.
It was one of the most difficult things to see that some media houses, including this one, would be pulling out of the coverage, to protect the lives of those whose own stories are as important as the stories they would tell. We are largely past that election, leaving the rest of the drama to participants to battle it out while the rest of us moved on. Not many people can now recall that there were journalists caught up in what will remain a nightmare for them. Even those who couldn’t stomach the pain of looking for missing journalists have to move on, pull those off the grid, and bring in new foot soldiers. Most journalists do not cover more than two election cycles, because it is simply too much. I know this because I used to train journalists on election coverage before every election in various parts of the country. It would be hard to find in the room people who have covered just the previous election from Karamoja to Kasese. Then there would be special programs to ensure more female journalists can dare to cover elections, even when newsrooms doubt the safety of these otherwise good journalists, choosing to assign them ‘other’ stories.
So the system remains, new actors come. When the stage gets tough, we recruit people whose courage can withstand that season, and then move on. Another normalized bizarre occurrence. The thing about systems is that whether we create them or not, there will be a system. The political scientists talk of chaos theory. That even in the chaos of it all, there is a complex system at play, invisible or not. There is nothing random. And the chaos often works for some groups. So we throw our hands in the air and say the system is broken, nothing meaningful can be done to fix it unless the entire system changes. We focus on changing the system even as it mutates. As we approach the 2026 elections, there will be no time to discuss media freedom or even the health of our democracy. Those who should lead the way are finding their way, trying to survive no matter what. Before we know it, we will have settled for something. The rest is history, as they say. And another five years will start by crawling, then sooner or later, another election is upon us. Many are then convinced that freedom is overrated. We sleep. Nobel Laureate, Maria Ressa, a journalist whose work is familiar from her CNN days to Rappler, makes an interesting observation about systems.
‘The way that a system behaves cannot be predicted from what you know about the individual parts. In fact, the system as a whole exerts pressure on the individuals, a kind of peer pressure expended by group dynamics, which often makes them do things they wouldn’t do if they were alone.’ The net result she notes, is that ‘when that group dynamic leads to the group becoming a mob, whether online or in the real world, the emergent behavior is unpredictable and dangerous’. We can relate to the mob during elections, often wearing party colors and their maddening gaze at those passing by, probably wearing enemy colors. When the uniform of the journalist instead acts as an identity marker for the group that must be sorted and made to behave. And that unpredictable and dangerous behavior is evident in spaces we least expect it. Commitment to a justice system that works for all assures every group that feels threatened of redress, preventing them from going rogue. Sadly, our systems are largely broken, thus, the work of journalists will never be done. Journalists, whether in mainstream or online, can always reinvent themselves for the next season, doing their part in a complex system.
Emilly Comfort Maractho, PhD.
Associate Professor of Media Studies.
