Need a licence to do journalism? Unthinkable in South Africa.
But in the past year, Mozambique’s democratic government has suggested exactly this. As you read this, Kenya and Tanzania are seeking to legislate the same.
From Senegal to Nigeria, Mali to Ethiopia, the practice is: you want to be a journalist, you register.
After all, people need licences before being let loose on the roads or acting as medical doctors. Why should cowboys, charlatans and crooks be allowed in journalism?
In this vein, Tanzania’s recent draft law says it is ”rescuing the media sector from harbouring incompetent and unqualified journalists”.
Do these countries have a point? What’s so different about journalism that it shouldn’t be licensed for quality reasons?
And, given that journalists often argue for special privileges — like being excused from revealing their sources to the authorities — doesn’t that need a system for who legitimately qualifies?
Seemingly reasonable points, but they’re wrong. And there’s a sting in a registration system. If recognised journalists get special rights, shouldn’t they also get special responsibilities?
That’s exactly the case in places like Mali. To work as a journalist there, you need a press card that, according to the law, is ”a binding declaration to comply with the rights and duties of the journalist”.
Duties in Mali can be onerous. The country has just punished a journalist for writing about an actual classroom exercise that supposed the president had a mistress. Mali’s rulers did not frown upon, nor fine, the (registered) reporter — let alone just live with the story. They jailed him.
In Senegal, if you get a press card fraudulently, you get up to three years in jail, or a fine, or both. In this country, the special responsibilities require registered journalists to publish only information that has been verified, ”or, in case of the contrary, state the necessary reservations”.
That assumes an omniscience in journalism that is sheer fantasy. What it signals is how registration systems constrain journalism, and how, if you violate some responsibility, you can trigger the proverbial ton of bricks.
Kenya and Tanzania seem to think it all OK if a registration system is run by a statutorily recognised body comprising people from outside government. Most other governments prefer to make the registration call themselves. Zimbabwe leads the offenders here, as well as in court cases against unregistered journalists.
In fact, it makes little difference who does the licensing — whether it’s the media themselves or the government directly. The system as such is intrinsically about suppressing voices.
Rather than admit to control-freak thinking, governments typically lay down ”neutral” criteria for registration.
Nigeria, for example, requires its journalists to be trained at ”an approved mass-media institution” or to hold ”a certificate of experience in the prescribed form from the person in charge” from such an institution.
Tanzania’s draft law sets up a ”Media Services Board” such that: ”No person shall practise professional journalism in Tanzania unless he/she holds academic and professional qualifications recognised and accredited by the board.”
It’s a minimum of a university degree for anyone wanting to work as a journalist. If this goes through Parliament, any editor without academic pedigree in Tanzania will be working illegally. Rank-and-file reporters have a five-year period to get graduated.
There’s more: ”It is an offence under this Act for any employer to engage a non-qualified person to practise journalism.”
Qualification criteria like these are also not just a bias towards making journalism an elitist occupation. Instead, they are mainly about getting journalists to toe a line. Actually enforcing a qualification bar in African educational conditions is unworkable, but having it in place provides a weapon that can be used selectively against dissidents.
The democratic alternative to all this is to just let anyone practise journalism, and — if need be — identify them thereafter.
International jurisprudence, in fact, recognises that free expression means the freedom for anyone to do journalism. It is also very clear that journalism is not the same as providing a service like medical care.
To this can be added: nor is journalism like driving a car, where damage done is physical. Harm done through the media can be remedied after the event. One example is of victims successfully suing for defamation. Another is prosecution for child pornography under appropriate laws.
What about ensuring quality? Faced with a market of ideas and information, the public themselves figure out which journalists, and which media, are worth believing.
The notion of licensing the ”professionals”, however, is the thin end of wedge towards controlling every person’s access to mass communication — people like bloggers, for instance.
At root, this is the most obnoxious aspect of requiring registration, because the system amounts to pre-publication censorship.
The default position is that free speech is a privilege, not a right. And the corollary is that only selected persons may do journalism (and then with a patch on one eye and a hand behind the back).
The effect is a double deprivation of the public’s right to receive information.