ANALYSIS: When facts take a flight

At a recent lecture, renowned columnist, Olatunji Dare, admonished Nigerian journalists to "engage in a relentless search for facts, and cultivate the nice sense of discrimination essential for distinguishing fact from rumour or gossip." He added that, "Journalism serves the public interest best when it is grounded on facts."

While this should be part of the holy grail of journalism anywhere in the world, perhaps the piece of advice is more needed now than any other time. Indeed, Mr. Dare could not have been more clairvoyant.

Nigerians, on Tuesday, July 21, woke up to a deluge of adverts in two major newspapers. Nothing strange, except that a bank, Access, which is among the top 10 banks by assets in the land decided to lay bare "facts" in a transaction involving it and another company, African Petroleum, AP, plc.

On Wednesday, AP responded with its own "facts" and expectedly, substantially different from the previous day's adverts. The ding-dong continued on Thursday with Access releasing another set of "facts" to shoot down AP missile. Interestingly, some papers carried both set of adverts on Thursday.

To an observer, however, some real facts emerged from the adverts. A business relationship has gone sour and parties to the deal decided to wash their dirty linen in the public.

Regulatory agencies have waded into the matter through petition and complaint by the duo and as usual in this clime, the issue is under investigation. Read, we might not do anything beyond what we have done till now. Further, there's a pending matter in court arising from the disputations.

But journalism is also an interested party in this matter. Beyond the cool money from the nearly 20 advert pages which at an average rate of half a million naira per page would have equaled N10 million spread across the media landscape, digging for facts had taken a back seat.

Many Nigerian newspapers have preferred to let sleeping dogs lie in the matter of Access and AP. And that's why Mr. Dare advice becomes relevant again. "What's going on under the surface? What does it mean today, and what will it mean tomorrow? Is there a trend, a pattern? The journalism teacher challenged his colleagues.

"It does not show us as a self-respecting institution," says Tunde Akanni, a media scholar at the School of Journalism, Lagos State University. "I mean we've got no self respect at all, money is good so the adverts are welcomed but we owe the reading public access to information," Mr. Akanni adds.

"Why are we then shouting about the Freedom of Information bill when we cannot do the job well? The media ought to go into the workings of the Nigerian Stock Exchange since both companies are publicly quoted and complement the regulatory authorities to take decisions by asking probing questions."

A former newspaper editor who had acted as managing director while editing a paper offers another angle to the saga. "When you're confronted with the wage bill, you cannot reject an advert unless you've taken a decision to reject such earlier," he says.

He referred to the situation under Abacha regime when a newspaper rejected adverts supporting the elongation of the late dictator's rule and how some newspapers will not allow adverts that are wrapped around the cover pages which is the vogue among some advertisers presently.

Mr. Akanni points at another reason why journalists should pursue the story further, "It's obvious they are both giving information that only favour them and this is not good. They must be hiding facts just releasing what they feel the public should know from their perspective. The media must probe deeper."

Maybe, Mr. Dare will find listening ears one day.