In this discussion of the trajectory of the media – print and electronic – before, during and after the war, I focus The Media Before, broadly on the following areas: Access, Technological Development and General Practice.
The 1980’s – The Media Before
For all media - print and electronic – simply getting started was very restrictive, during the 1980s.
License to publish was awarded by the Minister of Information under the formal criteria of either a University degree with five years experience or a Higher Teachers Certificate (HTC) with seven years experience. This was not all that was required, in fact. Because the Minister had the responsibility to reign in the Press, he had to take in to consideration the editor’s perceived political leanings.
Access to broadcast privately on both radio and television was barred by law.
Somehow, however, a group of graduates from the only University, who had staged the turning point “No college No school” demonstrated against the then APC government in 1977 and managed to acquire the go-ahead to publish The Tablet newspaper (est.1977).
The Tablet was meant to be the doctor’s prescription drug for the ailments of the system then. And true to form, the radical band of angry youths desperate to mature into manhood, set out to practice the brand of reportage which was critically aggressive, peppered with eye opening exposes’ of the somewhat endemic corruption being perpetrated by government officials.
The Tablet differed from the main stream reportage done by the government owned Daily Mail and the ruling political party owned We Yone, by not subscribing to the unwritten rule of attacking all other government officials but not the President. Instead The Tablet revelled in its frontal attack on the President himself.
Without an existing school of journalism and any formal or in-house training in journalism as practiced by the Daily Mail and We Yone, the instant success of The Tablet brand of journalism, earning the paper pride of place on the newsstands, and completely out-selling the established Daily Mail and We Yone, meant that this brand of journalism would be practiced by successive newspapers for a long time.
During this period, newspapers were printed by letter press and when production problems bedevilled the editors/proprietors, then jumped to cyclo-styling. The Daily Mail and We Yone had their own machines and soon The Tablet acquired a fairly usable second hand one too, in 1980 but it was not to survive for long.
As would be expected of a regime which did not tolerate opposition, in 1981 the offices of The Tablet newspaper were attacked by APC operatives and dynamite was used to bomb the ageing letterpress machine while the paper’s staff were mercilessly beaten up with the only reporter found on the premises that day ending up in hospital. The others went underground and the main players fled to the United States where they took temporary asylum.
The legacy of The Tablet was their style of journalism, which under the circumstances became more appealing and ending up as the copy-book example of how to practice journalism in Sierra Leone – a standard misused by some to get themselves hunted by the government so as to run away to Europe or America and seek asylum and make use of the opportunities there to improve their lives.
The Tablet experience revealed that the reading public will respond positively to stories published which were bravely written, exposing corruptions and primarily targeting government or top party officials.
This was to become the new genre in Sierra Leonean journalism developing and leading to disastrous consequences for the profession.
In the wake of The Tablet’s exit, the government soft-pedaled on the restrictions for registration and a new crop of Newspapers started publishing. These included The Globe (1983), For Di People (1984), New Citizen (1986), Chronicle (1986), The New Shaft (1984), Weekend Spark, Vision and others.
A couple of the then emerging editors had been part and parcel of the defunct Tablet while others had become disgruntled with work at the government owned Daily Mail and the party organ We Yone, and of course the only radio and TV station the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Service (SLBS) which was intricately part of the wider Government Information Service (GIS)
For these newspapers to succeed, the obvious trend was to hit out at government policies and expose corruption. Those who criticized the hardest and published more revealing corruption stories became the most popular and instant successes in the market. On the other hand wary of the treatment meted out to The Tablet some of them were more cautious and played hot and cold, while others still opted for the middle of the road stance.
The economic situation in the country took a turn for the worse. Government officials became more desperate to keep themselves out of the front pages of newspapers and thus started befriending journalists.
These relationships turned into protectionist pacts with the journalists who benefited from monetary handouts. Editors became prime targets, and when their reporters sourced out the corruption or murky-past stories, the victims quickly sorted out the editors, offering them money to kill the stories.
This led to distrust between the editors and their reporters, such that the reporters then started facing the victims with their corruption stories and offering to accept a small amount of money not to take the story to the editors for publishing.
Given that some editors could no longer afford to pay their reporters, some reporters now concentrated on finding out the corruption and murky-past stories and facing the victims for cash without any reference to their newspapers.
Some editors now simply gave their reporters ID cards and sent them into the streets to make money for themselves while on the other hand bringing in harmless stories now and then.
Thus entered the era of the money making and blackmailing in Sierra Leonean journalism leading to a drop in professionalism.
On the other hand corrupt officials had begun offering bribes to kill stories about them and this led to further blackmail.
Attempts at seeking redress from the courts in cases of genuine libel were thwarted by the existing court system which dragged cases to run for years, forcing out-of-court settlements which did not help in curtailing the practice.
Government officials and individuals sought the temporary measure of executing a warrant of arrest on a Saturday and dragging the offending journalist to jail for the weekend before bringing him before a Magistrate on a Monday and allowing bail.
The accusatory stories did not stop because the government too had in a few cases sacked officials as a result of the exposures.
The corrupt government officials then sought a new tactic to reduce the effect of exposures written about them by going to other newspapers to publish a counter story. As such the trend developed known as “attack and collect” with newspapers attacking an individual and then collecting money for doing a counter story - presenting the individual in the opposite light started.
The cardinal rule of not attacking the President re-established itself again except for a few of the remnants of the radical Tablet group.
Well sourced stories gave way to commentaries and started another interesting new genre practiced by the New Shaft newspaper. This was written in the form of a conversation between two people (in this case ‘Mother and Child’) in which the Mother tells the child revealing historic events about individuals – set out in a satiric style which did not leave much to be imagined. Again it was an instant success in the market place.
With the bombing of The Tablet’s letterpress machine the move to offset printing was hastened. By the mid 1980s all newspapers were now being printed by offset, using lithographic plates. This entailed typing the stories in columns on now ancient typewriters and cutting them and pasting on a full sheet of vanguard and using stencil rulers to make out the headlines. Spaces are left for pictures which are photographed separately for placement on the lithographic plates, which were then exposed to ultraviolet light and made ready for impression on an offset printer. This was known as the “cut and paste system.”
By the end of the 1980s the challenge was not to find and write well sourced developmental or human interest stories, (though some of these type of stories did find their way into the newspapers) - this was for the Daily Mail or We Yone rather, the drive was to search out for hints of corruption or a murky past and “go to town.”
The 1990s – The Media during the War
The 1990s were the best and worst for the media in Sierra Leone.
The 1990s brought with it a return to multi party democracy and with it an opening for a fresh wave of newspapers to hit the streets. These newspapers were manned by the former reporters who had sought out financial help from whatever source and were now confident that they can out sell their former editors in the market.
In 1992 the Military through the NPRC took over governance.
Reporting the war was a new thing for most journalists. The corruption stories were now shifting to the back burner whilst the war stories were now gaining prominence.
However the lack of a truly investigative culture hampered the accurate reporting of the war, as few reporters ever dared to visit the war front where the action was, but instead preferred to take second-hand information from fleeing residents, travelers or transport drivers.
Foreign journalists were looked upon as special species and more daring since they ventured where the local journalists feared to tread. There was always the excuse that because they were foreign they will be perceived as neutral by even the rebels.
Newspaper reports of the war began to improve as local journalists started copying the style of the foreign journalists. The prominent war reports started coming from the local correspondents of the international news agencies, like the BBC, VOA, RFI, REUTERS, Agency France Press (AFP), Associated Press (AP) and others.
As a result the correspondents began to give more up-to-date news than the local newspapers, which seemed to compete as if they were not all working in the same environment. Some newspapers - with a few exceptions - simply copied what for example the BBC says about the war, and what was in fact reported by the local BBC stringer.
This trend lasted a long time. Some critics say this was due to laziness on the part of the local reporters while editors quickly came to the aid of their reporters claiming lack of finance to fund news gathering about the war. This was, however, not true as even when the war reached the doorsteps of Freetown, hardly any local reporter found the time to go to Kossoh town which was barely seven kilometers from the city center. They relied on reproducing news from the BBC, RFI and so on, although there were a few exceptions.
The 1990s also witnessed a level of harassment of the media. When the military government took over the young soldiers were at first happy to work with the press to put out their own side of the story, but when the journalists started to report about military excesses the soldiers became violent.
Their first step was to appoint a lawyer as Information Minister. The new minister wasted no time in impressing on the minds of media practitioners the threat of the Public Order Act, which hung like a sword of Damocles waiting to drop on any violator.
The next step was the appointment of one of the former Tablet newspaper boys who had returned from exile to participate in governance. His strategy was to bring in new regulations for registering. His mission, he said, was to get rid of ‘brief case’ newspapers which were those with only an editor who acts as the sole reporter and carries his office in his briefcase.
The new rules demanded that a Newspaper should have an office with a signpost, a telephone and two million leones in a fixed deposit account to service any would be litigation for libel against the newspaper and also property worth two million leones to be used also as collateral. All of these were to be fulfilled before a deadline. He succeeded in reducing the number of newspapers from about twenty to just eight.
This crudely repressive policy had the paradoxical effect of allowing the surviving newspapers breathing space to develop and develop they did. The old style of cut-and-paste gave way to computers, and pages were now designed using PageMaker software. By the end of the decade all newspapers were now using computers for their layout, and all newspapers were now printing using offset printers. For the brief case newspapers and others a private computer enterprise at Short Street F.W. International became their base. Here, after collecting their stories they would go to F.W. International to plan their layout on computers. The majority of newspaper staff was not yet knowledgeable enough to use the computer. This however changed with time.
The worst period for the media during the military rule was when staff of one of the leading newspapers – New Breed – was taken to court and convicted of defaming the then Head of State Captain Valentine Strasser over an alleged diamond deal.
This brought new awareness for media practitioners, because the manager of Atlantic printing press who was the private printer contracted by the New Breed, was also drawn into the lawsuit and detained along with the journalists. This succeeded in sending real fear into the managers of private printing presses who were now refusing to print for newspapers because as they said - they did not want to go to jail for what the journalists had written.
Other instances of journalists being beaten up, arrested and locked up for simply taking a different view, were many, and some were downright ridiculous like the day the New Citizen Editor was arrested and locked up simply because his imprint detailing the address of the newspaper and the name of the editor did not appear on that single edition. The incident though punishable by law, was however seen as a move to teach the Editor a lesson for his uncomplimentary editorials.
Another ridiculous arrest was that of the New Nation editor Vandi Kallon, who was accused of revealing military secrets to the rebels. This was because he had published on the front page the photographs of several armoured personnel carriers which had been paraded in broad daylight along the main streets of Freetown. Kallon actually thought he was celebrating the show of force by the military.
During this period also there were only four printing presses available to newspapers. Two were owned by For Di People and New Citizen newspapers, the third was owned by the government owned Daily Mail while the fourth was John Love printing which was owned by one of the most renowned Heidelberg printing machine engineers in the country.
With the fear of going to jail in the minds of private printers, printing of newspapers became constricted to these three and as a result, the new term ‘drowning’ came to depict those newspapers which had been properly planned and taken to the printing press but did not succeed in being printed – hence in the new media language they drowned.
Newspaper circulation during this period was between 6 and 10 thousand copies daily. A decade earlier The Tablet was selling 12 to 14 thousand. A decade later circulation had dwindled down to 2 thousand copies daily.
The second half of the 90s saw the coming in of a democratically elected civilian government, which opened the doors wide for all to publish and the number of newspapers subsequently jumped from 8 to over 40. The pages dwindled from eight or twelve to four. The number of radio stations also started to increase.
The SLPP government also became fed up with the criticism it was receiving, more so with the re-surfacing of corruption and murky past stories.
A landmark issue was when the editor of Torchlight newspaper published a story about government bribing MPs because they somehow sanctioned loans for the MPs at the government owned Commercial bank. This incensed the MPs and they summoned the editor to parliament from where he was sent to jail. This did not earn the SLPP any more friends in the media.
In reply they then took to parliament a new bill which was to bring in stricter controls of the media. It did not see the light of day because the AFRC coup over took it.
The AFRC coup brought out new challenges for the media. For those who were lazy and sat back waiting for the BBC to report and then plagiarise it, the war had now come to their doorstep, Freetown.
The coup divided media practitioners. There were those who supported the illegal government and there were those who stayed on the side of the people.
Revealing stories about the atrocities published in the age old Tablet style with penetrating bravery took over the front pages. As was expected it drew fierce reactions from the junta and cases of arrests of journalists were very common.
A clandestine radio station set up by the government became of the junta’s most formidable enemies; the junta’s utter control of the state media could not overshadow the strong effect of the guerrilla radio on the people who were looking for prompting to carry on the resistance against the junta.
Coverage of the war however improved considerably though for the most part it was off and on. Again a new and perhaps the biggest wave of exiles took place. Almost all journalists on the side of the people left the country. Those who stayed later told lurid stories of their ordeals at the hands of the junta.
In 1998 when the junta were overthrown, all those journalists who supported the AFRC fled into exile and a couple of those who had stopped their outward journey in Guinea and The Gambia came back home.
In 1999 when the junta came back and halfway overran the city several journalists were targeted and killed.
Again the war took over the front pages and this time around a few more local journalists were brave enough to now start visiting the frontlines.
The media helped greatly by publishing positive stories of accounts of the war in the run up to peace.
The Media after the War
After the war, the media took time to begin developing again.
Elections followed immediately after the war was declared over and this served to push the war reports out of the front pages.
The breakthrough in elections reporting was seen more in the broadcast media than the print. This is because for the first time in the history of the country nearly all the independent radio stations were linked together and they were giving live coverage of the elections results straight from the polling stations, and most times even before the results were relayed to the elections office. This to a large extent stopped or rather minimized fraud.
After the elections the corruption stories again found their way to the front pages, along with the murky-past stories.
The Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE) implemented a Canadian government grant for local newspapers by selecting five newspapers and improving their quality of reporting by in house training sessions and also providing a printing press with strict guidelines.
These five newspapers started using digital cameras along with Photoshop software to layout their newspapers. This was another technological leap as other newspapers sort to follow. The five newspapers became the top of the line and signalled a new wave of development in presentation along with content. The five ( Concord Times, Salone Times, Standard times, Independent Observer and Awoko) became the best selling newspapers with the highest circulation (2,500)
These newspapers changed to eight pages and all others had to follow. The cost also changed from Le200 to Le500. However, because the leading newspapers were now under obligation not to publish unsubstantiated corruption stories, the focus of the press started to change.
The seeming success of these newspapers saw some of them leaving the CJFE patronage and going alone. The first was Awoko which shortly after secured its own printing facilities. The Standard times was soon to follow, having secured its own printing machines. The Concord Times has also joined with its own printing facilities.
These newspapers are now moving steadily into being run as businesses which was not the case with most newspapers. As such the quality of reportage is steadily rising.
Awoko has started coloured printing while the Standard Times does colour at least every quarter.
Distribution still seems to be a problem, with the highest circulation in Freetown and only a handful of papers ever reaching up country.
The cost is now Le1, 000 and this increase saw the drop in circulation from 2,500 to one thousand five hundred.
A little bit more professionalism is now being employed in reportage although the old tricks are still around.
Kelvin Lewis/editor of Awoko.
(This write-up by Mr. Lewis was originally requested for a Sierra Leone Journalism Review, in 2007)
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