Facing biased reporting in Nigeria
Christians in Nigeria, and indeed in West Africa, face two major urgent challenges, two battle grounds: first, the devastation to lives and property caused by radical Islamic sects.
This they can do very little or nothing about. The government has the sole responsibility to protect lives and property and to engage with and resist the terror groups to stop the persecution.
The second challenge is the battle in the media. Most Christians are frustrated by the propaganda, misinformation and deliberate distortion of news that paint completely different pictures of their situation and the predicaments they suffer. While Christians and churches are unable to do much about the first challenge, they are also ill equipped and unprepared to handle the second.
Our own media?
In a world of mass and instant communication, dissemination and interaction, the question could be: ‘Why can’t the church have its own media platform to disseminate information?’
The last time any Christian organisation had any major established media was when Radio ELWA transmitted on short waves from Liberia to the whole of West Africa. But the war in Liberia destroyed the station. Though it has been rebuilt, its services are now only local to Liberia.
There may seem to be extensive media coverage of the persecution of Christians and the devastation by radical Islamists in Nigeria. The Chibok girls’ saga seems to be before us periodically. But the news about them or Boko Haram, a terrorist Muslim sect out to destroy the church as well as any form of formal education, is not the total picture.
News blind spot
There is a blind spot in the news reports received by other countries from Nigeria about Boko Haram’s devastation of the predominantly Christian communities in Northern Nigeria. In fact, hundreds of young men are being conscripted as child soldiers to fight for Boko Haram and hundreds of women are being abducted. A Christian denomination, the Church of the Brethren (EYN), has been almost completely obliterated in the north east. Many family members are still missing. International media reporters, working on tight schedules with limited space and competing for top stories, miss out on most of the crucial issues in the region.
Added to this blind spot is the complaint by some church leaders in Jos about biased reporting by the Hausa services of the BBC, by Voice of America and by Aljazeera. Local media are no better, because they are controlled by governments, state and federal, and therefore most are miserly with facts. The few privately owned media mostly lack the desired professionalism for balanced and unbiased reporting. Those owned by mega-churches are simply cable channels for preaching.
Journalists killed
In an attempt to fill the vacuum, some Christian journalists created a platform to network among the local church media departments to gather and report their own stories. This did not get very far because, soon after the first few reports came out, two members of the team, Sunday Gyang Bwede and Nathan S. Dabak of the Lightbearer pub-lication, were killed in Jos by a Muslim youth on 24 April 2010. This dampened the journalists’ zeal. Some church leaders in northern Nigeria have met over the issue, but competing demands have made this a difficult project to execute.
Reliable information
This is a challenge for the African region. The church needs an agency that will provide a platform constantly to engage both local and international audiences on issues that impact the lives of people across all religious, social and economic divides: a news agency that will keep important and strategic debates going to hold people in authority accountable to and responsible for the societies they serve, an agency that will articulately report the testimonies of God’s grace and transforming love as well as the genuine failures of his people in their own lives and communities.
I believe that Global Christian News is that agency and will be invaluable for the church in achieving this. This is even more critical at a time like this where there are competing and sometimes conflicting reports. Many people cannot seem to find authentic or reliable information about the state of the church in persecuted areas. The professionalism and integrity that Global Christian News will bring will indeed be invaluable.
Evangelicals Now July 2016 https://www.e-n.org.uk/2016/07/world-news/facing-biased-reporting-in-nigeria/
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
