By Bamidele Johnson
*Photo:Bamidele Johnson*
Not long before the now-departed Jose Peseiro was hired as technical adviser to the Super Eagles,
I found myself listening to one of those radio stations where everybody is committed to sounding the schooled at Eton. I was driving. That was my first mistake. The second was leaving the radio on.
The programme was a phone-in which, in modern broadcasting, is roughly equivalent to opening the gates of a psychiatric ward and asking patients to formulate public policy. The presenter, a woman whose relationship with factual accuracy was purely casual and perhaps occasionally adulterous, announced that Amaju Pinnick, Nigeria Football Federation President at the time, had spoken to Jose Mourinho and Arsène Wenger about becoming coach of the Super Eagles.
She then invited listeners to react.
There followed a stampede of callers so hysterical you feared one of them might burst an artery live on air. Had it been a physical gathering rather than a radio queue, the National Emergency Management Agency would have needed to intervene. Caller after caller screamed about Nigeria lacking seriousness, about delusion, about foolishness and how Mourinho and Wenger were “far above our level,” as though the country had applied to borrow Buckingham Palace for Ojude Oba.
Only, that was not what happened. I had read the original story the previous day. Pinnick had merely spoken to the two men and asked them to recommend suitable candidates. That was all. A fairly ordinary football administration thing. But accuracy, sadly, is no longer sexy enough for modern broadcasting. The presenter improved the story the way roadside mechanics improve your car by damaging it beyond recognition.
As public frustration with the Super Eagles at the time was bubbling away like hot water, she knew exactly what she was doing. She offered the audience a communal kicking target and stood back while they enthusiastically performed the execution.
I remember sitting there in disbelief, wondering why exactly I had chosen to poison my own morning.
It reminded me why I stopped listening to radio years ago and why I avoid television too. These days, I mostly consume news through reading because, although newspapers and websites have their own pathologies, they remain relatively civilised compared to the raw sewage treatment plants masquerading as morning current affairs television.
It was not always this way.
There was a time when flagship current affairs programmes actually attempted journalism. Presenters asked questions because they wanted answers, not because they wanted clips for Twitter accompanied by fire emojis and declarations that somebody had been “finished.”
Back then, interviewers approached facts with the care of a gold miner separating the ore from mud. They challenged power, interrogated assumptions and prepared well. Today’s current affairs broadcasting is often nothing more than emotional pornography for the perpetually outraged. Its primary function is not to discover truth but to flatter public prejudice.
The question is no longer: “Is this accurate?” It is: “Will this trend?”
Truth has become the side chick, while virality is now the lawfully wedded wife.
The decline arrived gradually, like mould spreading across forgotten bread. One producer noticed outrage clips travel further online than nuanced discussion. One anchor realises social media applause produces a pleasant narcotic sensation. Another discovers that ignorance delivered confidently sounds remarkably like expertise to an audience equally under-read. Before long, entire editorial cultures are built around emotional extraction from the mob.
Modern broadcasting increasingly resembles organised hysteria with advertising breaks.
What makes this especially depressing is that many practitioners genuinely believe they are heroic truth tellers. They wear the costume of public service while engaging in intellectual oloshoism, confusing applause with credibility and online noise with democratic wisdom.
If the public is angry, they become angrier.
If the public is irrational, they become clinically insane.
The role of journalism, however unfashionable this may sound, is not to amplify public emotion but to interrogate it. A serious interviewer should challenge assumptions, not merely echo them with a face like a warthog’s.
Instead, many anchors now behave like emotional support animals for public resentment. Their interviews are not conversations, but theatrical ambushes. Questions are asked not to obtain clarity but to produce viral moments. The guest is not there to explain anything. He is there to be ritually sacrificed before an audience demanding blood.
“The interviewer finished him!” people say afterwards.
Finished him how, exactly? As how? By shouting louder?
By interrupting every sentence? By replacing evidence with sarcasm and snark? There is one television anchor in particular who, without his glasses, is the identikit of a serial killer with the mouth of a raptor. Every discussion involving him is soaked in theatrical indignation so exaggerated you half expect background thunder effects.
Underneath all this noise lies something far uglier than bias. It is catastrophic incompetence. Many modern broadcasters are astonishingly under-read. They possess strong opinions on economics while barely understanding compound interest. They moderate constitutional debates without having read the constitution. They discuss diplomacy, security, judicial procedure and energy policy armed with little more than a few tweets.
Still, they strut around studios with the swagger of war correspondents returning from Ukraine via Gaza and a brief stopover in Mogadishu. I once watched an interview with Finidi George after he became coach of the Super Eagles. The presenter informed him that he had heard performance clauses were included in his contract.
Finidi nodded.
The interviewer looked stunned. “A whole Finidi?” he asked, apparently unable to comprehend why an employer might include performance conditions in the contract of an employee whose literal job is producing performance.
At that point, my soul briefly attempted to leave my body. Older generations of journalists certainly had flaws. Plenty. But many at least feared public embarrassment enough to prepare properly. They read books, researched subjects and understood that ignorance on live television was not charming. Today, confidence has replaced competence. A nice suit, imported accent and aggressive tone now suffice.
The fraud goes undetected because audiences themselves increasingly confuse loudness with intelligence. Producers, tragically, are sometimes just as dim. This intellectual poverty feeds directly into the rise of client journalism, where entire programmes function as short let apartments for elite political warfare. One faction sponsors outrage against another. Suddenly, broadcasters discover investigative courage. Then alliances shift, money changes direction and moral urgency mysteriously evaporates overnight.
The audience is never told who exactly is funding the orchestra while the anchor conducts with righteous fury.
This explains why the same behaviour condemned as authoritarianism on Monday becomes “strategic leadership” by Thursday once committed by the correct politician. Principles become elastic, while outrage becomes selective.
Alongside these is ego, perhaps the terminal disease of modern broadcasting. Many presenters no longer see themselves as journalists but as celebrities, activists, moral redeemers or national therapists. The programme ceases to exist for public understanding and instead becomes a daily exhibition of the anchor’s own magnificence.
Guests are invited not for enlightenment but for humiliation rituals. Complex problems are flattened into childish binaries because nuance does not go viral and subtlety rarely trends. I once watched a clip where an opposition politician was barely midway into his first answer before the anchor snapped: “All of you in the opposition are jokers.” I have been unable to live it down.
Television, which once aspired to public enlightenment, increasingly resembles sponsored gladiatorial combat moderated by people who think shouting is a substitute for thought. Worse still, audiences are now being conditioned to prefer it this way. Nuance appears weak to viewers addicted to outrage. Careful analysis is dismissed as boring. Measured discussion becomes “soft.” Many people no longer consume news to learn anything. They consume it to experience emotional validation. They tune in wanting their prejudices massaged, their enemies insulted and their existing beliefs returned to them.
Producers comply happily because hysteria rates well.
The result is a vicious feedback loop. The more irrational the public mood becomes, the more broadcasting amplifies and intensifies it. Journalism, which ought to cool societal temperature, now often functions as an accelerant.
Emotional arsonists pretending to be firefighters.
The consequences are serious. When journalism abandons truth for sentiment, public discourse collapses into tribal theatre. Facts lose authority, while expertise becomes irrelevant. Intelligent people withdraw from debate because they know they will simply be shouted down by over-excited performers.
Charlatans flourish because television increasingly rewards certainty over accuracy.
Democracy itself suffers because citizens cannot make rational decisions inside an atmosphere polluted by emotional propaganda disguised as journalism.
Equally depressing is the industry’s near-total resistance to introspection. Any criticism is immediately framed as hostility to press freedom. But freedom without standards is merely branded chaos. Journalism is not noble simply because it calls itself journalism. A butcher carrying a stethoscope remains a butcher.
What the industry desperately requires are humility, intellectual discipline, curiosity, moral honesty and presenters secure enough not to treat every interview as a WWE promo. It also needs editors with cojones to prioritise accuracy over applause; journalists willing to disappoint audiences with uncomfortable truths instead of seducing them with fashionable lies.
Most importantly, it needs to remember that journalism exists not to emotionally gratify the public but to inform it truthfully, even when truth is unpopular and insufficiently exciting.
Until then, many flagship current affairs programmes will remain outrage manufacturing plants staffed by performers who mistake noise for substance and applause for integrity.