August 2008

As a first-time blogger on this site, I will focus on bringing experiences and reflections on how communication plays a key role in initiatives related to governance, a role even more fundamental than that played in other kinds of development programs. Before digging more into this, I would like to illustrate and hopefully clarify one term that, due to its broad and multifaceted connotation, is used too frequently in an ambiguous manner: communication. Most dictionaries and basic textbooks define communication basically as the act of sending messages or, more specifically as a sender transmitting messages through channels to one or more receivers.

"Unless mass views have some place in the shaping of policy, all the talk about democracy is nonsense" - V.O. Key said that in 1961 in his book Public Opinion and American Democracy. It reminded me of the discussion that Sina, Taeku, and I have had on this blog with regard to John Kingdon's Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies. When reading this eminent work, I had been surprised how little influence the media and public opinion were supposed to have on policy making. According to Kingdon, the will of the public had considerably smaller effects on policy than the President, Capitol Hill, and lobbyists in the U.S. of the 1970s, putting policy making somewhat closer to nonsense than it should be.

In the early 1990s, I was on the Editorial Board of the leading newspaper of record in Lagos, Nigeria until I left for the UK. It was called The Guardian; and  it is still there. I had been in the Nigerian media for a while and to be invited to join the Editorial Board of The Guardian in those days was regarded as an achievement. So I was pretty happy with myself. I later found out, though, that I had been hired more for my writing skills than my wisdom. That humbled me, believe me. And I was not alone in making that discovery. Most of the leader writers were in the same boat; they were mostly idealistic but gifted intellectual types.
 

In June 2007, just a few days before he left office, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair gave a speech on the relationship between government and the news media. Speaking to Reuters news agency, he diagnosed the relationship between politics and the media to be in tatters. He made his position rather clear: The media "is like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits." He said that reporting is driven by sensationalism, the need to attack and to exaggerate.