- Brimming with chutzpah, media has become handmaiden to the powerful and those who hanker after it
We are ears and voice of the deaf and the mute. At least this is what we are supposed to be. At least this is what the deaf and mute expect us to be. At least this is what we convince ourselves to be.
Our job is to tell people the goings-on that affect them. What is wrong in their country, what is at the bottom of all that ails their community, how their city managers are hoodwinking them. And we did that, once. We were the muckrakers. We were hooked on telling stories. We dug out skeletons that were interred deep. We haunted the demons who reigned supreme over the great unwashed.
Back in the day, our sole concern was to unearth the mess, filth, and dirt behind the spick and span facades of piety and false morality. People trusted us, they had faith in us. Now, they are addicted to us. We are like the cocaine addiction they loathe to the core but can’t find comfort and peace without a sniff.
What we are now has no semblance or relationship with what we were. We, the journalists, brought mightiest of presidents down, we made the world see that in the name of winning ‘hearts and minds’ millions were slaughtered at the altar of ‘Great War for the World’, we trained spotlight on the pious who abused kids and robbed them of their innocence, we saved lives by jolting the power to action, we took seven year old children out of factories.
What is the moral, you ask? There ain’t one, dear reader. We are above, beyond and ahead of moral, morality and bondages of right and wrong
We were a force of good. We were good people on a mission because this is what our business was all about.
Not anymore, now we have masters to serve, axes to grind, agendas to perpetuate, narratives to guard, and mindsets to mould so that we can have our way. So that we may buy, sell, trade, and barter favours.
‘Tis how the mighty have fallen. ‘Tis how low the upright have stooped.
What can offer us solace, where hides our sole panacea, where hides our Only Exit?
We get our catharsis at the hands of blabber heads, the run of the mill vitriolic media talks make cowards of us all. We are Hamlets and in our land, many things are rotten. And it is duty of my kind to sell the rotten carcasses, stale corpses, filthy remains, and bloody innards. We, then, are merchants of discontent and death.
We draw our authority from freedom. As few other concepts are contested more fiercely, denied more ferociously and wanted more desperately than freedom. Curiously, the first son of Lord Law, freedom is given as a right and taken away as a punishment by those who falter and fail to restrain themselves from crossing the red line. We abuse it.
We once dealt with facts, now we deal in opinions. Forgetting that a person is not entitled to his or her opinion. They are only entitled to their informed opinion. And no one is entitled to be ignorant.
Our opinions taint our understanding of the world: Opinions, whether based on cock-and-bull stories or objective, verifiable facts, dictate our actions. We, the opinion makers, form our opinions from interactions we have, encounters we survive, information we receive, rumours and hearsay we digest, and all the noise we endure from within and without.
We’ve not forgotten about Dawn leaks, have we? It was the latest episode, when a journo tried to spill the beans of what transpired in a high end meeting. It all started one not-so-fine morning when a hack ran a story in an influential English daily about uniformed folks being ‘told’ by un-uniformed blokes to mend their ways or brace oblivion among comity of nations. A deafening silence ensued for couple of hours after the publication of story. And then, as they say, all hell broke loose.
Alarm bells went up. Our saviour General R got rattled. Our former prime minister N, feeling cornered, sacked a trusted lieutenant for his failure to stop the news from being published. The air reeked of conspiracy and betrayal. Fear ruled in PM Office, paranoia reigned in GHQ.
Now, that we have benefit of both hindsight and retrospect, dare I say, it was a plain story about how world perceived us. We, out of habit, blew it out of proportion and then it fizzled out.
The Cain, Able and Seth, all three sons of our Republic-Mr Khaki, Mr Civvy and Mr Journo — were at daggers drawn and then peace dawned.
So, here ends our story. What is the moral, you ask? There ain’t one, dear reader. We are above, beyond and ahead of moral, morality and bondages of right and wrong.
We, the merchants of discontent, were, are and always remain at your service. See you folks around.