By Nnamdi Nwigwe
One needs to interact with politicians to appreciate how much they hanker after publicity. Not only politicians though. Chief executive officers in both the academia and the industry are equally delighted to receive positive press mentions regularly. And here lies the very demanding and stressful duty of the media personnel to satisfy his principal.
Mind you, the media aide has no media organ of his own to use at will to propagate the activities of his employer. He therefore needs to study closely the various media around to find out which best suits his boss and his message.
But politicians are a lot more visible and are more inclined to hire just anyone they fancy to function as their media assistant or press secretary. And in their recruitment, qualification, experience and competence are of little interest to them. Some politicians go for their graduate relatives who are yet to secure employment. Others go for old friends and associates. For example, the great Sam Mbakwe, first civilian governor of old Imo State, asked Mr. Egbesa Ihute, former reporter of a Port Harcourt-based tabloid, to be his press secretary. Ihute had covered Barrister Mbakwe’s court appearances over the “abandoned property” saga in Rivers State in the immediate post-war years. And Mbakwe remembered him when he became governor!
Some people invite radio-television presenters to be their media aides, while some are known to have opted for orators and Masters of Ceremony (MCs) to do the press secretary’s job for them or their establishment.
No wonder therefore that quality control is nearly zero as one tries to assess the products of these so-called media aides. But let’s first get this very clear in our mind. A press secretary without press and newsroom experience is a misfit, no matter his other paper credentials. A real press or media assistant should know his way around a media house and time lines or schedules of the editorial department, so he can send his releases or even invitations at the right time.
In issuing press statements or news releases, an effective press secretary should never forget the cardinal pyramidal structure of news. The news editors are dealing with many stories coming from many sources and there are deadlines to meet. So any matter you want to be used as news should say what the gist is about in your opening paragraph. Even the headline you cast for your release should capture the essence of the piece.
Beautiful prose and flowery adulations of a governor belong more to materials for the advert department. One is however uncomfortable with the trend nowadays for press rebuttals to be so heavily spiced with uncouth language, abuses and innuendoes.
There is always a reason or justification for a reply. Misinformation, for instance, should be replied with the correct information from the perspective of the press secretary making the rebuttal. Why stray from professional ethics to heap insults and diatribes on a public official, present or past, who said something that your boss is not happy with? Propaganda and intellectual provocations are certainly part and parcel of politics. Properly handled, they add fun to the game.
Take a typical case which has become a case study: In the Second Republic, a member of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) in the West tried to impress his party colleagues in the North and East by condemning Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s pace-setting free education programme in the First Republic and the Chief›s pledge to repeat same in the rest of Nigeria if he became President on the platform of the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN).
The NPN chieftain said Awolowo’s free education was so worthless that it produced only ‘touts and armed robbers’. To which an Awo disciple retorted: “How many of your relatives who benefited from it are touts and armed robbers?” Can you beat that as a good example of intellectual pugilism?
In the same manner, media aides should ensure they “assist” their principals to give a deep thought to what they intend to say for public consumption. And the aides themselves should also ensure in their press releases that they go straight to the point to correct whatever wrong impression they think that had been created by what they were rebutting. No beating about the bush. No abuses; no insults. Indeed, the media assistant who intends to excel may need to take a course in Public Relations (PR) or work closely with a PR practitioner to help him refine his language beyond its newsworthiness.
Finally, our editors at whatever level should be conscious of their heavy responsibility to the society. They should professionally sieve materials that arrive at their tables and strike out words and phrases that add no value to the subject, but are otherwise offensive.
Most of the tension we feel in the polity arise often from careless statements in the media that should not have been allowed to see the light of day.