After The Dinner, The Bill Must Comes In Due Season

THE PRESIDENT BROKE bread with the press and made handsome promises. The media is dying of economics, not only of muzzling, and this government will be judged by the Sustainability Act it passes, not by the dinner it hosts.

TWICE NOW, PRESIDENT Joseph Nyuma Boakai has set a table for the Liberian press, and twice the men and women of this trade have come, eaten, and listened. There is something to honor in that. A head of state who sits across from his sharpest critics, and tells them plainly that he will not jail or muzzle them, is not a small thing in a country whose newsrooms still remember the boot at the door. We take the guarantees Minister Piah read out in good faith. We welcome, without grumbling, the news that the Finance Ministry has at last begun paying the old debts that strangled radio stations and newspapers under governments now gone.

BUT A DINNER is a dinner, and a country is not fed by toasts. When the plates were cleared on Saturday night, what remained on the table was a bill, and the press leaders were right to hand it over. Julius Kanubah asked the only question that matters: what will be the media legacy of this administration? More than a year after the first dinner, he counted what has not moved. No Media Governance and Sustainability Act. No reformed ELBC. No structured lifeline for the community radio stations that are, for the woman in Barclayville and the farmer in Voinjama, the only voice that reaches them.

THAT IS THE real emergency, and it is not the emergency of the muzzle. It is the emergency of the empty account. Alphonso Tweh said it without decoration: the media is dying. Ask any editor in Monrovia what it costs to keep one reporter filing from Sinoe for a month, and you will understand why the President’s own agenda is reported from the capital and merely rumored in the counties. A press that cannot afford to leave Monrovia cannot hold a nation accountable. It can only hold a microphone.

SO WE SAY to the President: the guarantees are welcome, but they are the floor, not the roof. Lisa Tenneh Diasay put the point beyond argument when she reminded the room that inclusion is a count, not a sentiment, and that the women at the cabinet table dropped from nine to seven while the ink was still wet on the ARREST Agenda. Inclusive development that nobody can verify, she warned, is only an announcement. The same is true of press freedom. A freedom the reporter cannot afford to use is only a paragraph in a speech.

THERE IS, TOO, an uncomfortable seat at this table that no one wished to name. In the same season the government promises it will never again humiliate a journalist, the nation watched a former Vice President paraded before the cameras before a court had said one word. If the state can do that to Jewel Howard Taylor, the newsroom is entitled to ask what its own guarantees are worth on the day the story turns hard. Promises made over dinner are tested in the cells, not at the podium.

The ANALYST will not pretend the fault lies on one side. Too many of our colleagues do publish the rumor before the fact, and too many mistake the WhatsApp forward for a source. The minister’s four questions, is it true, have I verified it, is it fair, what if I am wrong, should hang on the wall of every newsroom in this country, ours included. Self-regulation is not the government’s gift to grant; it is the profession’s debt to pay.

BUT LET NO one confuse the two bills. The media owes the public accuracy. The government owes the media a law that lets it survive. One dinner does not settle either account. When the President hosts a third dinner next year, let him not ask what the press has written about him. Let him bring the Sustainability Act, the finished PUL headquarters, and the county reporter who can afford the road to the story. That is a legacy. The rest is just a good meal.