Similarly, fairness and some kind of balance, things like relevance; you can’t tell me that there are some cultures, where for some reasons it’s okay for a journalist not to hold power accountable, for example. It’s nonsense. So I don’t like this relativity talk. [. . .] Because they are trying to suggest that you know for us in Africa, because we are developing nations, we should have a journalism that is different. That’s nonsense, I don’t agree with that at all. [. . .] Our experiments in Africa [have] been sooooo pathetic and a disaster. [. . .] I mean, we had so-called New Information Order debates in the 1980s. What did it give us? It gave us media that were serving the interests of ruling parties, media that were incapable of holding power accountable, civil society, business, accountable.64
Generally among journalists in Gulu, in the context of the peace process, of increased political control and of NGO financial and ideological influence, “objectivity” strongly sided with “responsibility” as defined in relation to the peace negotiations or socioeconomic development. What was striking in the context of Northern Uganda was the congruence between this media ethos and the objectives of control by the state, although such congruence was not necessarily intentional. The most repressive actions taken against the electronic and print media up to the mid-2000s were generally linked to security issues, in particular the regional balance of powers: Rwanda, DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo), and John Garang’s death.65 The coverage of the war against the LRA was also especially difficult, because of insecurity in the field and political pressures, and regularly led to police summoning journalists for questioning.66
Media workers and government officials did not necessarily share the same conceptions of what “protecting peace” involved in terms of language discipline. It happened, however. An example of this coincidence between government objectives of control, the desire by journalists not to jeopardize the peace process, and more classical concerns about accuracy had to do with the publication of casualties.67 As the same manager from Mega FM explained:
During the times when the rebels were still fighting and inflicting a lot of casualties on the UPDF [government army; Uganda People’s Defense Force], sometimes cross-checking some information was very difficult, like if there was an ambush, sometimes you hear that they have killed so many UPDF. Some will say no, they’re only a handful. . . . Very few . . . So for us it was so difficult to cross-check that kind of information. [. . .] Putting a story that maybe the rebels have killed so many government troops will definitely encourage the rebels, saying they were doing very well, and it will not contribute towards the resolution of the conflict. So rather than do that, you need to do it in such way that probably they triggered some casualties. . . . You hide the quantity, but you say “some.” Because they were “some,” even two can be “some.”68
According to the government, in times of war the media should avoid publicizing losses by the army, transmit any information they have to the state, and, more generally, avoid publishing any information “unfavorable” to ending the war, which was for a long time understood as crushing the rebels, and later on turned to the promotion of amnesty measures.69 If they did not comply, journalists risked being qualified as enemies of the state or terrorists. This example shows again the importance of deciphering the ways political control over the media is justified, as these practices of control may appear more or less legitimate among media professionals. In this case, not publicizing the number of casualties not only was the result of coercion and fear of repression; it also corresponded to a particular media ethos supported by international donors, even if media workers and state officials did not always share the same vision as to how the war should end.
Today in Masaka, as in Gulu, private advertizing is available for radio stations paid for by local, national, and international companies (especially for sodas and mobile phones). The market is much more dynamic than it was fifteen years ago. This has decreased the financial dependency of stations on NGOs and local authorities. However, even if doing business with local and international NGOs is no longer a vital necessity, most people inside the stations, beginning with the owners and managers, are not considering giving up selling their airtime to NGOs. This practice is not just a source of profit. Working together with NGOs is part of a professional ethos and has been integrated into a discourse on the “public service” a given station has to pursue, in the same vein as broadcasting information about health, promoting peace, or providing technical advice to farmers. Many radio staff in Masaka and Gulu think their work should benefit “development” and “peace building” and not merely information or political debate. Radio presenters up-country very often repeated how they wanted radio to “talk about development, not politics.” This imaginary division—though actually very blurred—between what belongs to a realm of “development” and what falls into “politics” is very entrenched and influential for both media workers and state officials. In Uganda as elsewhere, politicizing an event or an issue is often likened to the contamination of fundamental collective domains linked to the basics of life and survival by narrow interests.70
President Museveni regularly announces that government might shut down “anti-development” radio stations.71 Resident district commissioners (RDCs), who represent the president at the district level, often exhort journalists to stop meddling in “politics” and focus on “development.” The words of a station manager in the East of the country interviewed by Peter Mwesige illustrate very well this affinity between political control and the promotion of “development”: “When the big bosses come around, we host them and people can [call in and] ask their questions. But we can’t just bring up anything, without backing. We prefer development issues. We don’t entertain hardcore political programmes. Tomorrow, if the Minister says ‘I have closed you,’ where do you run?”72
In this context, many journalists prefer avoiding what they define as “political” issues, in the name of prudence, but also in the name of ethics. They prefer being what they define as “apolitical” and focusing on what they consider to be “more important issues,” assimilating “politics” to “politicking,” and considering that the latter endangers peace and development. Confronted with tragedies such as war, extreme poverty, HIV, and in accordance with the preoccupations of international and local charity and development organizations that buy radio stations’ airtime, journalists formulate models of media excellence that are alternative to those usually followed by journalists in Kampala, and that resonate with old debates on the role of the media in Africa and beyond.73
Concretely, this means that media workers tend to shy away from contradictory debates that tackle national and party politics as they see such debates as counterproductive and because their audiences are supposedly not interested in those. As a former producer from Radio Buddu in Masaka explained:
[Contrary to the ones in Kampala], the ekimeeza in Masaka was not going to be political at all.
Q: Why not?
A: Because the problems of Masaka Region were not political. They were more social and economical problems. There was a lot of poverty, a lot of ignorance. And so we would use that radio to give people the chance to talk about their personal problems. How do they improve . . .
Q: But maybe they wanted to talk about the government and—
A: [He interrupts] Yes, and . . . Tactically, I just avoided that. One, because the political environment in Masaka was very, very volatile.
Q: What do you mean?
A: Was very uncompromising. People were uncompromising. My father, before I really took that job in Masaka, at that time my father was in Masaka, he told me, “My son, you are coming to Masaka, but avoid politics. There is a lot of political intrigue.” Intrigue, it means . . . hmm . . . fighting inside. So you avoid that. [. . .] I wanted Buddu to be a unifying factor, so we tried to avoid politics in
