Liberia's umbrella organization for journalists, the Press Union of Liberia (PUL), will be 45-year-old in September. Ahead of the anniversary, AllAfrica's Boakai Fofana asked the union's president, Peter QoiQoi, about the state of journalism and press freedom in Liberia.
What is the Press Union's role?
The media in Liberia has come from a rough environment… It [the union] all started [by] growing out of a history of attacks on the media – the media has spent the better part of its existence fighting for a better space to operate, and we thank God for the legacy left by our friends who have painstakingly brought the union this far.
We are no longer being brutally assaulted as we used to be in the past. But there are serious challenges… now in the face of new global media upsurge – the Internet, citizen journalism, etc. So with new times come new challenges, and they are numerous.
Can we safely say that we have a free environment in which the press can operate now?
There were times when newspaper offices were burnt. There were times when journalists were brutally assaulted. If one were to put yesterday and today on the scales you will find out that [threats] yesterday will outweigh [those] today.
That is not to say we haven't had some altercations between the press and the government. Issues are still there that we need to address. But if you were to do a comparative analysis with what happened in the past, it's fair to suggest that things are getting better – I always describe the situation as "lukewarm".
In recent times we had a problem between the President pro tempore of the Senate and a group of journalists assigned to the Capitol. The press union had to move in to arrest that. Thank God that the [Senate president] realized that he was wrong and apologized.
Some would say these are isolated instances but that it's not a systematic thing from the top. What would say to that?
That has always been the argument. Even in times past they would say it's not a government-sanctioned action. But governments… would not say, yes we sanctioned it: in the past, when security agents have gone to the press and changed headlines, the government at the time said, hey, these things are not sanctioned by the government.
Even now, there are times when journalists have been assaulted and some of their equipment has gone. The president has said this was not the making of the government… We are not going to have a situation in which the president of the country will be directly involved… but the people who operate the government are the ones who are involved in these attacks and there is no way you can excuse the government from that.
What do you make of the current standards of reporting in the press? There has been criticism about sensationalism, failure to check the facts, etc?
It's not as bad as some people have interpreted it to be but equally it's not as good as we want it to be. As much as we want to advocate media rights, we must be prepared to speak about the wrong things in our midst. This is why this administration has undertaken to deal with some of those problems that... for me are squarely related to the working conditions of journalists.
Most of the media houses here underpay their employees. I think that is directly linked to ethics. If you have somebody going out in the field and he has to pay his own way to fetch the news and he's not coming back on time or he has to wait around for the newsmaker to transport him, that is a serious problem we need to deal with.
A two-day conference we organized in April has sought to enter a collective bargaining agreement with media employers… The hope is that we can derive a minimum bench mark or minimum wage. I have said… that we have spent too much time advocating for other people's improvement, why can't we do it for ourselves? Unless we do that, we will always have these problems….
It's my understanding that some journalists make far below the minimum wage set by government?
Yeah, this is obvious and nothing to shy away from. Some of our colleagues make as little as 20 dollars a month, sometimes less. This is disgraceful. We need to address that. Of course there are some institutions that pay far above the minimum wage paid by the government but right now some journalists fall far below what least-paid civil servants make.
Let me acknowledge that there are a few papers and a few radio stations that have gone far ahead in correcting some of those problems. They pay better salaries. [But] for us to be able to deal with the problems we face in the media, we must begin to lay emphasis on the working conditions of journalists. I think this a press freedom issue.
You are advocating that the government subsidizes you – is that right?
As we started the debate around improving the conditions of journalists, the argument was made that how can you talk about the journalist and not what happens in the media environment as a whole, because you can't divorce the two. So what we have done is to start a debate on how can we seek government support for the media – not necessarily the press union, some of our colleagues got the argument mixed up.
We are saying, for instance, if the government can waive taxes, because taxes are high, that would be a subsidy to the media. Or the government could include the media in the budget, or in whatever way we can get that going. I think it would be a big plus.
Critics might say how can you check what the government's doings when in effect they are sponsoring you?
No, no. They are not sponsoring us. We need to let the government know that this is a sector of society that we need also to correct. We talk about the press being the fourth estate [but] I don't know how we intend the press to operate.
The government sponsors every other sector in society except the press. We allow the press to operate by itself and so we have what we have. This is a big debate around the world, not only in Liberia.
I do believe that if this support is legislated, where it's not coming from the president – and that's the point we are making: nobody should do it because of patronage, where you will sit and say, "Let me dash the press with some money and I think that I can influence the press."
If you have legislation, where the media is a part of the development package, I think it makes a lot of difference. I don't think it will influence anybody.
Some accuse advocacy organizations such as yours of blanket defense of your members and of turning your eyes away from some of their ethical transgressions. We see a lot of sensational headlines that are clearly ethnically inciting or politically biased, especially looking back at where we came from. What efforts are you making to address this?
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What we have done in our own self-regulatory regime [is to] bring some journalists to book… In the Truth and Reconciliation Commission period, we drafted a code of conduct in addition to our general code and we issued statements to bring [members] in check. Any time we do that to a journalist, I am sure it brings him to public shame, and that for me is a way of reprimanding people… We have [also]… suspended journalists for breaching ethics…. But we are not a court house, neither are we a police station where we lock people up.
What we ask... the public to do rather than just take arbitrary action is to begin to take some journalists to court. This is the last resort if we can not harmonize things at the level of the press union… If you were to have a case in court that was logically concluded and a penalty imposed, I am sure it would [correct] some of the errors that we have in the media. But there hasn't been a case where people have taken real action. All they have wanted to do is take arbitrary actions and the press union will not sit and allow that to happen.
Don't you have a way of setting standards for who becomes a journalist in Liberia?
Certainly it's difficult and this why the collective bargaining agreement also takes into consideration the entry point. We have insisted that media owners… can set some standards for those they employ. But for the press union to decide who becomes a journalist, that will be too much for us to do.
What we can do on our own is to set some standard as to who becomes a member of the union. Not all journalists in Liberia are members of the press union. Membership is voluntary. The good thing… is that most journalists subscribe to the press union.
