NBC’s real struggle

The year before the general election is a time when people and organisations experience the pressure that pushes them to reveal their character. This year is no exception, and you can already see that in the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation’s threat to media houses. In a statement they recently issued to electronic broadcasting stations across the country, the NBC warned them to adhere to the media broadcasting code, or face sanctions. The way they cautioned media houses not to incite crime or public disorder, one would be forgiven for concluding that the disorder in Nigeria is the fault of media houses.

This latest press release is another instance of them shaking up the media houses in anticipation of the role they might play in the 2027 election. The warning they issued is neither new nor out of character, and they have been consistent on this path enough for me to conclude that their real struggle is that they neither understand nor can figure out their relevance in a world where broadcasting is driven by the market and the regulator is redundant. How do you effectively regulate broadcasting standards in the 21st century when anyone with a camera phone, a made-in-China ring light, and a penchant for chaos can be a newsmaker? The world of news-making has radically changed, and media houses are adapting to the reality of audience-driven demands. The only party that does not get it seems to be NBC.

Press release after press release, there is little evidence that they have reflected on the complexity of the world we live in now. They do the same thing they have been doing since the 20th-century military government days: wave the broadcast codes, threaten media houses, and impose a huge fine (which, thankfully, the court has proscribed). Their attempts to define standards would at least be credible if they were not so bogged down by their own lack of institutional autonomy. The NBC does not hide its partisanship; it took one complaint by Bayo Onanuga in 2023 for them to proceed with a shakedown of the media houses.

Some of the ideas the NBC holds as sacrosanct are the broadcast codes written during the pre-media liberalisation era, when the few broadcast media houses in existence were run by the government. In those days, media houses broadcast from 4pm to 10pm on weekdays, and once they were gone, the TV was dead. The media held the cards and were rightfully called “agenda setters.” They could define issues and shape public perceptions of them. In those times, it was essential to insist they give equal airtime to factions because to deny a party a fair hearing was to effectively silence them. If you were shut out by the media in the 1990s, you had little or no recourse, making it imperative that professional standards be defined by ensuring all sides get heard in the same broadcast. Today, there are not only media houses scattered across every corner of Nigeria competing for an audience (that watches the news through social media!), but even individuals on social media with a larger following than the audience of a dozen broadcast media houses put together.

In fact, some media houses have stationed their reporters on the social media pages of regular individuals to report their banal opinions as “news”.

There are far too many avenues to get your side of the story out, and none of it rests in any single person’s hands anymore. Power has changed hands, and media houses no longer hold the ultimate license to define discourses. You can even undercut live media programming through social media, and media houses now find themselves reacting to the agenda more than they can set it. News reporting operates in a digitalised environment that puts media houses under pressure to adopt a format that, if necessary, suits the pugilistic character of social media where the audience now lives with endless distracting choices. But the NBC? They are insisting on upholding the standards written for the analogue environment. Nothing in their press releases suggests they have factored in all the changes and are thinking ahead of these issues. Every single time, they are merely reactive.

Now, the NBC and I would probably agree on the necessity of professional standards, but we would differ when asked to define what that means in practice. It would have been helpful if the NBC had given instances of “expressing personal opinion as fact” that irk them, because the fact vs opinion debate is one of the most complicated. From rhetoric to philosophy, experts debate the terms all the time. Everyone will agree that opinions can be factual; facts can inform opinions. So, for instance, saying “the Bola Tinubu administration is repressive” is, strictly speaking, not a statement of fact, but is also a claim that can be well-substantiated. So, what does “opinion vs fact” mean to NBC?

The NBC still seems stuck in this broadcasting format, where news reporting is a detached exercise. A reporter sits in front of the camera and merely reads the script as it scrolls on the teleprompter in front of them. They do not add or subtract. We have long moved from the news as information to the news as entertainment, a development necessitated by a capitalist ecosystem in which media houses must compete fiercely for public attention. There are radio stations in the South-West where the Yoruba news reading is no longer distinguishable from other entertaining programs. While presenting the news without injecting opinion is straightforward enough, it becomes more complex when the program shifts to an interview or roundtable format, where the news anchors discuss the news. How can a team of newspeople go through an analysis of the news reports without moving from detachedly stating the reported facts to interpreting them? If, for instance, a journalist reads a news report stating that Aso Rock has budgeted billions of naira for solar energy, we can easily agree that this is still within the realm of factuality. If the same person mentions Tinubu’s campaign promise to either give us electricity or be rejected for a second term, are they still being objective, or have they shifted tone from being removed in their reporting to making a subjective point? That is why the NBC needs to be clearer about what they envision as ideal standards rather than hiding behind vague, outdated concepts.

But then, I suspect that NBC’s issue is not so much about news reporting as about the news anchors and interviewers who can go very hard on guests. The NBC officials must have watched the Mehdi Hasan interview with Daniel Bwala and must have been aghast at the interviewer, who did not conform to the textbook ideal. Except that what NBC takes as guest intimidation is what needs to be done when you are dealing with bad-faith actors who want to take advantage of professional courtesy to propagate falsehood. Imagine if, in the name of not harassing a guest, Hasan had let Bwala off the hook when he denied his own words. What would “professionalism” look like then?

You see, as long as the guest is not held down at gunpoint at any time, they can always exercise their free will to terminate an interview. The audience, too, is free to change the channel if an opinionated journalist gets out of control. When I am watching a television show and a bunch of men, overwrought by emotion, are yelling at each other, am I stuck with them? No, I have choices. I can change the channel, and I can also endure the hysterics if I find it entertaining enough. We have choices, and the reality that our choices are regulatory in themselves is why the NBC must seriously rethink and redefine its role.