THE CHALLENGES OF JOURNALISM PRACTICE IN NIGERIA (A STUDY OF NIGERIAN TELEVISION AUTHORITY, ENUGU)

Background of the Study: Journalism in Nigeria has continued to grow immensely in line with global trends despite strong infrastructural challenges. Communicating with a mass audience is not totally strange in Nigeria. Thus, mass media have been important tools in communication, and through which information is passed across within the society (Ben, 2016).

In mass communication, the media are divided into the electronic (broadcast) and print media. The print media involves mainly magazine and newspaper; they are informers which provide retrievable, researched, in-depth and interpretative news stories of events. The broadcast media comprise of the radio and television, it has not been as enterprising as it should be. This is due to the majority ownership and control of the broadcast media by the government. These two branches of the media has played vital role in broadcasting of information in the society.  

Abdur-Rahman (2013) in describing the media roles noted that broadcast is a society wide type of message dissemination, which involves the transmission of ideas, words, sounds, pictures and values in the form of signals through the airwaves to a target audience. Ben (2016) opined that broadcasting is an activity of a branch of the media of mass communication called the electronic media that use transmitters and airwaves in the transmission of news and information to their heterogeneous audience.

According to Munyua (2010), information is the least expensive impute for societal development and it can also be viewed as a basic necessity ingredient for bringing about social and economic change in any nation. On this fact, Santas and Ogoshi (2015) stated that the mass media play crucial roles in achieving developmental objectives at local, national and international level. The further noted that the mass media has been recognized as an important resource for mobilizing an entire nation towards national development. Being an integral part of the social system, the mass media is a major stakeholder in the realization of sustainable development in Nigeria. Thus, in the process of information dissemination the media prepares the ground for development.

However, there are several factors hindering the effectiveness of the media in information dissemination. Santas and Ogoshi (2015) opined that factors like corruption, poor communication channels, illiteracy, inadequate infrastructure, poor implementation framework and political instability has continued to pose great challenges to the achievement of sustainable development of Nigeria media. Otolo (2015) also highlighted that ownership is one of the major problems facing the media in Nigeria, be it State or Federal. In most cases, there is a stigma on journalists who work in these media houses as they are often seen as government’s propagandists. Journalists are made to give the activities of their government owner more prominence at the expense of other important issues. When they fail to do so, regardless of their role or importance to the media organization, the reporters risk being sacked or demoted unless they are lucky.

According to Udeajah (2014), everything points to the fact that ownership has had some significant effect on the operations of broadcast organizations in Nigeria. The policy of the persons who pay the broadcaster’s salary determines the operation of the media station. Ben (2016) observed that the government owned media houses in Nigeria have been known to suffer a myriad of problems which have left them redundant and reduced them to mere “government handouts”. This is as a result of the overbearing influence of the government owners on the media houses. Barnabas (2017) stated that due to the government control of the electronic media, they lack credibility and objectivity. This can be accounted in the caliber of workers they parade. He further noted that the media is heavily being affected by poorly educated editor and reporters who are easily target for manipulation by the government and its agents.

In the same vein, it is important to note that beyond the control from the government as posing as one of the challenges affecting the media in disseminating information, the new media idea poses a great challenge to most media houses in Nigeria. The new media rely strongly on digitally powered technologies, allowing for previously separate media to converge. Media convergence is a phenomenon of new media and this can be explained as a digital media. According to Flew, (2012), “The idea of new media captures both the development of unique forms of digital media, and the remaking of more traditional media forms to adopt and adapt to the new media technologies". This obviously accounts for the reliance on computers, smart phones, tablets, and other medium instead of the previous analogue means of information gathering. The most prominent example of media convergence is the Internet, whereby the technology for the streaming of video and audio has now changed the face of broadcasting and movies rapidly.