Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone press in "soul-searching" after civil war

afrol News, 16 August - A new report studying the situation of the press during the 10 years of civil war in Sierra Leone concludes that both President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah's government and the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) routinely had targeted the media. Now, corruption among journalists was "endemic".

The special report on the media situation during Sierra Leone's civil war titled "Identity Crisis", was released yesterday by the US-based media watchdog, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

All in all, 15 reporters were killed during the war. This high number of journalists killed had included three foreign correspondents. The rebels alone were responsible for 13 of those deaths, according to the report. Two were probably killed by government forces.

Given the long abnormal period for journalism in Sierra Leone, the situation was not yet normalised. Since the war ended in January, a "surprising" number of reporters in Sierra Leone had sought political offices to thwart interference with the flow of information - one of the many examples that highlighted the Sierra Leonean media's search for a new purpose, the report said. 

Journalists had also began to engage in "impassioned soul-searching" about corruption in the media and other unethical practices that had undermined the press' credibility, CPJ's report says. Frank Kposowa, former president of the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists is quoted in the report as saying that since authorities loosened licensing restrictions in the early 1980s, he had witnessed an onslaught of "fly-by-night operations" run by people with uncertain journalistic credentials. 

According to Kposowa, this atmosphere had helped swell the number of newspapers to almost 50 since 2000, from just a dozen three years earlier, the report said. This was especially amasing in a country whose illiteracy rate tops 70 percent.

Although the government may be staying out of the media's way more often these days, the columnist Mohamed Koroma of the private weekly 'African Champion' in the report said that "greed, selfishness, and a poor sense of the media's role in a democracy" counted among the most pressing issues he and his colleagues faced. 

- The government leaves us alone these days, Koroma says. "But nothing seems to have changed at all. Sleazy reports on the lives of politicians continue to fill the papers. We [journalists] are not talking on behalf of the people, we are still oblivious of their views."

Also other members of the Freetown press corps had been interviewed by the CPJ team. They especially cited their own vulnerability to bribe taking and influence peddling as major hurdles to achieving real independence from the various groups competing for power in the country, according to the report.

An editor at the independent weekly 'Pool', Cherno Ojuku-Sessay, was emphatic that political bias in the press endured and was becoming more blatant. "Many so-called independent newspapers are actually funded by political groups," he said. "Corruption among journalists is endemic." 

Sources: Based on CPJ and afrol archives

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