Context Matters

“CONTEXT MATTERS”

“The West's construction of African “corruption” is shallow, oblivious to cultural variance and ultimately designed to serve Western economic and geo-political interests under the guise of weeding out something deliberately portrayed as universal negative”. (William De Maria, 2014)

I spent six months delving into Ghanaian reporting and editing practices at newspapers in Ghana. I focused on the exploration of complementary cultural practices that are “misread” or complicated by both embedded Ghanaian sociocultural values and equally robust news practice ideologies. My research involved spending time on assignment with reporters, in the newsroom with reporters and editors, and numerous interviews with practitioners, sources, educators, researchers in Ghana, and government policy-makers. The net result is a sociocultural linguistic examination of “Solidarity” actions in the context of newsgathering and reporting.

My work provides a context to what Skjerdal says : ‘global journalism values are rendered ineffective and obsolete in Africa. He makes this critical appraisal of journalism in Africa because of the established practice of giving of tokens, often monetary, to journalists in the course of news-gathering. To the extent there is a shared understanding of what the practice constitutes, it is referred to differently from country to country but broadly classified as “brown envelope journalism” – literal or figurative “money inside unmarked envelopes” – and thus a “corrupt” practice. However, the research has focused on Western-centric notions of value and has not considered the actual discourse of the Global South, or the cultural practices that co-occur with it, which my thesis addresses.

What is critically absent in these discussions of corruption in Africa is whose voice or understanding forms the basis of such evaluations. Consequently, the focus on the culture of the Global North has resulted in?narrower understandings of what “corruption” is or can be and as a result, societies with differing social, cultural and historical backgrounds are variously stereotyped as having a “culture of corruption”, “belly state”, “network culture” and “gift-exchange culture” (Torsello 2015:4). In other words, the culture of non-Western societies is questioned and mocked because it does not fit into other models that are projected as the norm or acceptable behaviour.

I argue that gifts and exchanges in the media practices in Ghanaian society, which the Global North views as a “universal negative” and which media scholars and educators in Ghana tend to view as both problematic (on the professional level) and necessary (on the day-to-day level), actually contributes to the dissemination and packaging of news, which in many cases would be difficult to do in the face of the realities that confront under-resourced journalists on the job. The complexity is one of scale, and the single-word label of “corruption" does not cover the varied routines of exchange or editorial influences that are part of the journalist’s day-to-day and the end-product news story.

My thesis adds to the voices of scholars who advocate for prioritising the values and norms of the Global South, rather than imposing the value judgements based on the culture of the Global North.?

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