The Adulteration of the Media

While Botswana prides itself with a cadre of enterprising reporters and creative editors who deserve honourable mention for covering environmental issues that contribute to public knowledge and debate over critical issues of biodiversity loss, development and conservation, the grim reality is that the overall participation of the powerful mass media tool in environmental journalism and broadcasting is scanty and thinly spread.

In an industry where, ‘fluffy stories and cute pictures’ make the front page and occupy prime time while environmental journalism is continuously relegated to the periphery of social discourse, these journalists and broadcasters are the selfless patriots to whom we all owe a huge debt of gratitude. To the heroic foot soldiers in the battle to bring conservation issues to the front burner, and raise awareness of environmental topics, I salute you.

However, in the face of imminent threats of global warming; unsustainable land use and resource exploitation; inadequate freshwater flows; pollution; habitat conversion and modification; invasive species; and many other destructive forces, there remains a glaring lack of interest and mediocrity in the coverage of environmental issues by members of the fourth estate. This wanning, scattergun approach to environmental journalism has (probably not without reason) been viewed by environmentalists as a drawback that retards global action to protect the environment and amounts to a deliberate erasure of the genre.

Now, more than ever before, the magnitude of the stress to ecosystems and the threat this has on the world’s fragile water supplies and agricultural production could have dire ramifications for both humanity and nature. This calls for winning partnerships between governments, environmental organisations and the media where the phenomenal power at the media’s disposal can be leveraged to raise awareness on environmental issues and campaign for change of habits and behaviours that are detrimental to the environment. Environmental journalism is after all, essentially an advocacy tool to encourage its audience to adapt a more biocentric worldview and environmentally sensitive attitudes.

The conservation story however is not only about the environment. It is about much more, as it touches just about every aspect of life. It involves the world’s primary resources, clean water, fresh air and biological diversity. Environmental cadre, Mohau Pheko observes that contrary to popular perception, “conservation is not an exotic hobby for white liberals but a life and death issue that should be our priority because humanity cannot survive without clean drinking water, nor can we live without food grown in rain–fed fields and woodlands for fuel, fodder and carbon sinks to soak up the perilous carbon dioxide from the blazing fossil fuels we burn to power our machinery.”

In an era of pervasive and far reaching mass media the media remains the single most effective way of taking the conservation message to the masses. The media has an obligation to cover biodiversity related themes with clarity and accuracy, it has a duty to educate the masses on the importance and urgency to preserve the natural wealth of our world. Tragically though, the industry’s commitment to its obligation is faltering as biodiversity themes continue to fall outside the mass media’s radar because of the myth that conservation stories are a ‘hard sell’ that is not exciting or appealing enough.


Frazer Kopanag laments the emasculation of the media when he states that the, “castration of the media watch-dog by commercial interests has taken the spark out of a supposed to be vibrant media.” Keletso Sedirwa is even less complementary when she lambast’s commerce for the, “prostitution of the media for commercial favours.” These frustrated outbursts decry the enervation of the environmental movement by the apparent censure of environmental issues by the mass media. They bemoan the unfortunate emergence of the abhorable, woefully unimaginative, ineffective and perverted advertorials that are the illegitimate offspring of the unholy liaison and adulteration of the media by commerce.

The superfluous indulgent tendency by the print media to scamper for the mundane and eyesore centrespread advertorials which parade modelling megalomaniac pseudo politicians, socialites and captains of industry at the expense of pertinent biodiversity related themes is a typical example of the environmental laggard of the press. A cursory glance at the setup of any newsroom will reveal a crime desk, a sports desk, a culture desk, but never a desk dedicated to engaging society on environmental issues.

It is tragic that environmental journalism and its conservation message are drowned in the parroted excesses of commercial self praise ad nauseam. Media coverage has in essence been reduced to a fierce jostle for time and space with advertising occupying a massive 50% - 70% of the limited time and space of the news media. The daily splatter of sickening advertorials in the local press is indicative of this convoluted trend. The ‘ugly duckling’ perception of environmental journalism is further compounded by the media industry’s mistaken believe that environmental issues tend to be complex in nature and involve drawn out processes that are not easily accommodated in the limited time and space of the news media. With such hardened attitudes, it is little wonder environmental journalism straggles to find a firm foothold in the traditional news media.

In the limited instances where environmental journalism has received media coverage, all too often, the coverage has either been oversimplified or sensationalised with robust greenhouse activism or bland misrepresentation of scientific research. Mike Hulme, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, points out that green militancy and megaphone journalism use, “catastrophe and chaos as unguided weapons with which forlornly to threaten society into behavioural change.” Evidently such alarmist shock tactics and inaccurate, stereotypical portrayal of environmental topics are the bane of environmental journalism that stifles public knowledge and debate over critical biodiversity issues.

Nonetheless, the challenge for governments and environmental organisations to harness the power of the mass media to raise awareness of environmental issues remains critical. Quality coverage of environmental issues is however not achieved from the confines of ‘cubicles in metropolitan newsrooms’, it is achieved through site visits to primary sources of news which remain a budgetary and logistical challenge for most media houses.

In an effort to address these challenges, the Ministry of Environment, Wildlife and Tourism, through the Okavango Delta Management Plan (ODMP) project and in collaboration with the World Conservation Union (IUCN), the University of Botswana’s Harry Oppenheimer Research Centre (UB – HOORC) and other environmental organisations commemorated the 2007/8 World Wetlands Day by inviting journalists and broadcasters into the Okavango Delta in a deliberate effort to raise the media’s awareness of biodiversity conservation and to get them to broaden and enrich local media coverage of the Okavango wetlands.

The objective of the site visit was to engage the media and to get the ODMP project and its partners to build constituencies that will catapult off the strength of the mass media to get the conservation message out into the public arena. It had been hoped the multiplier effect of the mass media would amplify the conservation message to the masses and entrench the genre’s foothold and the Okavango Delta’s profile in the traditional news media while promoting ‘greener’ behaviour that supports Botswana’s long term vision, Vision 2016.

The Okavango Delta is a treasure trove of news articles. The jewel of Africa is hydrologically unique. It is the world’s largest and most important wetland ecosystem which forms the world’s largest Ramsar site. The transboundary river basin receives its water from the highlands of Huambo in Angola and flows downstream through the narrow Caprivi Strip of Namibia before entering north-west Botswana at Mohembo in Ngamiland and disperses its flow in an alluvial fan known as the Okavango Delta.

The mosaic of channels, lagoons, intermittent swamplands and islands that emerge in the Delta’s waterways give rise to several diverse ecosystems, which in turn offer an oasis of habitat for the Delta’s rich biodiversity and myriad of different land and water habitats. These habitats hold a vitally important place in the ecological, economic and cultural fabric of communities living around the Delta as it provides a vast area of water and flooded grasslands with good grazing for the rich diversity of wildlife and livestock.

Increasingly, however, the Delta is under pressure. Increasing human population and water abstraction for irrigation, mining and domestic use upstream and around the delta have led to the unsustainable use of much of its natural resources. The magnitude of the stress to the ecosystem and the threat this has on the fragile water supplies and the general wellbeing of communities living in and around the Delta could adversely affect the fragile water course as we know it today. The cooperation and conflict over resources, the struggle over resource ownership, resource access and resource use that is unfolding in Okavango Delta Ramsar site could make for riveting anecdotes and in-depth news articles that give the Delta story a human face and bolster the prominence of environmental journalism in the mainstream news media.

The site visit by the local journalists and broadcasters represented renewed tactics in the contemporary environmental movement and a moral boost to the ecological avant-garde who will champion the environmental course. While there have been bursts of sporadic brilliance in the coverage of environmental issues since, the true potential of these initiatives is yet to be realised.


Postscript
Subsiquent to the the huge investment in site visits for local journalists, an audit of media cover on the ODMP project revealed minimal coresponding improvement in the cover of ODMP issues in the Okavango Delta Ramsar site. The project then embarked on a renewed drive to sustain media coverage of the ODMP Project by inviting select scribes for site tours. Former Mmegi Editor, Mesh Moeti was one of the media practitioners who accepted our inivitation and below are some of his insightful notes on the tour.

Re a leboga Mesh.