A bail-out for debtor media houses? By Idowu Sowunmi

THERE is no gainsaying the fact that some media proprietors in Nigeria are now wearing an unenviable toga of ‘debtor media houses’ thereby com­peting with some state governments over their abysmal failure to pay their staffers’ salaries as at when due.

The fiercest unimaginable and appalling scenario has nearly turned workers in these media to beautiful ‘slaves’ of some sort, because their employers have been failing to give them their take-home pay, vary­ing from four months to eighteen months. Whether this take-home pay can actually take them home or not is a matter for an­other day.

The whys and wherefores espoused as factors responsible for this unpalatable de­velopment are just too numerous to men­tion. But the principal reasons adduced in­cluded financial recklessness and lifestyle of some media proprietors; while others have been accused of unwise adventurous in their business calculations.

Whatever factor applicable, the glaringly realities today is that most media houses may not survive the current economic downturn in Nigeria which has forced many sectors to be gasping for breath for survival.

Based on this aforementioned economic condition, some people have insinuated either jokingly or otherwise that since the Federal Government is fast becoming a Fa­ther Christmas, doling out billions of naira in the name of bail out, first to airlines in Nigeria some years ago, and now to state governments and textile industries, media proprietors should be considered too.

This school of thought posited that if governors with ‘billions’ of naira at their disposal, from the Federation Allocation to the Internally Generated revenue could owe workers in their respective states for upward of five to eight months and then suddenly got a lifeline from the President Muhammadu Buhari-led Federal Government, it won’t be a bad idea after all then to bail out the Fourth Estate of the realm in the spirit of the season.

This thought, way back, recorded a ma­jor support in 2009 when President Barack Obama considered a bail out package for the news industry in the United States of Ameri­ca. In its report of September 21, 2009, The Hill said Obama expressed concern at the sorry state of the news industry and said that he will look at a news paper bail out, because otherwise, blogs will take over the world, and that would be a threat to democracy.

According to Obama, “I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogo­sphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding.”

President Obama’s position was viewed more as a political weapon to counter a society of people that is fast becoming cy­borgs, in which every one tends to rely on technology so much that it’s practically re-ordering our mindsets.

But another school of thought sprung up and reacted both angrily and proactively that never! Never! Never is the word. To this school of thought, the foundation of journalism as a fulcrum of objective reportage and constructive criticism will be forever damned and compromised. In exploring the decline of the American newspaper industry and examining proposals for government intervention to revive America’s newspapers, Andrea Priest in her article “Turning the Watchdog into a Lapdog: Why the Proposed Newspaper Bailout is the Wrong Solution for a Failing Industry” in 2011 concluded that “governmental support would ultimately harm newspapers.” Instead of reliance on a government bail-out, Priest’s 37-page seminal and informative article, published in William & Mary Business Law Review 401 (Volume 2: Issue 2), proposed that “newspaper enterprises pursue intra-industry solutions to remedy the crisis.” Certainly the two schools have good groundswells to their protestations.

Feeding on the irreconcilable differenc­es between these two schools of thoughts above, another chapter had been appre­hensively and distrustfully opened to the argument, saying journalists ‘must’ learn how to make money on their own in order to survive! Your guess is as good as mine! How? Why should they do that if no such recommendations were ever made to state government workers nor textile workers? They have worked and a worker deserves wages for his/her hard labour.

One significant line of notion I take away from Priest’s hypotheses of exploration is that “the industry crisis will not abate without action…” It’s a statement of fact. No matter which direction of spat one is firing his/her perspective, the crisis bedev­iling some media houses in Nigeria today will not abate without something being con­cretely and urgently done to save the souls of hundreds of workers as well as thousands of their dependents nationwide.

A considerable percentage of Nigeria’s workforce is employed by these media houses. Arguably, more than 80% Nigeri­ans still get their news from the traditional media i.e radio, television, newspapers/ magazines, leaving less than 20% to rely on online news. In the same vein, more than 90% of advert placement still goes to the traditional media.

Perhaps the media houses’ workers’ salaries are vast becoming the peg to ne­gotiate for a bail out for Nigeria’s news industry. This singular stroke, if acceded to and properly channelled, will succeed in not only being futuristic to protect the tra­ditional media from a death-blow of multi-source online information superhighway, but will ultimately also keep the Nigerian traditional news industry on its feet.

With a population of more than 160 million and currently dubbed as one of the 20 most populated countries in the world by the United Nations, I don’t think any newspaper organisation in Nigeria, for instance, can boast of printing one million copies in its daily edition or its weekly edition. Are we then saying that the reading population who can afford to buy newspapers in Nigeria is less than 10%?

SUN

END

CLICK HERE TO SIGNUP FOR NEWS & ANALYSIS EMAIL NOTIFICATION