Hi everyone. I’m back, and I’ve missed you all.
This is my first post since February, and Substack has taken on a different feel ever since then. My first impression is that it’s slicker and visually more appealing. It just might motivate me to resume writing here more frequently.
I was possibly woken up due to a mosquito buzzing in my ear. There’s no light here, and the heat is stifling. I pick up my phone. It’s 00:43, and I get a notification reminding me that today is my birthday. Today, I turn 42 (-10).
A natural question that follows, of course, is how I feel about that. Yesterday was my dad’s birthday, and he turned 68. While celebrating him, the mathematical realisation didn’t elude me that we would hit a combined age of 100 by the next day. That kind of knowledge fills one with some dread and/or soberness. The overarching feeling for me, however, is a sense of gratitude.
Today is two years since I launched this newsletter, and I still have many untold stories to tell. The one I’ll lead with is from exactly a year ago. By this time last year, I was struck by severe typhoid. One year after, I’m in good health. Whenever I count my blessings, I count good health twice.
Now, let’s talk about something that’s been on my mind recently.
Good news, bad news
My work as a journalist revolves heavily around understanding politics and the economy. Much of the news I cover can feel depressing in the wake of harsh economic circumstances. Sometime in June, I listened to a Ted Talk by Angus Harvey, a self-described “Good-news reporter” that talked about why journalists are so bad at reporting good news. He asked the important question of why good news is so rare before mentioning good news from around the world. I only learned through him that Togo had, in March, become the first country to eliminate four tropical diseases successfully.
According to Harvey, “When we only tell the stories of doom, we fail to see the stories of possibility”. I’d recently been discussing this with my colleagues about the need to do some “good stories”. So hearing a fellow journalist talk about it, you could say, supported my conviction—or confirmed my bias if you choose to see it differently. I briefly touched on some good fun facts people should know about Nigeria in an SEO story I did at work the previous day. The next day, I researched and highlighted good news from around the world on my WhatsApp status.
About a week later, I’d come on Twitter to see a post by the CNN International Correspondent, Larry Madowo, where he talked about his role as a journalist. Madowo hosts the show “African Voices Changemakers”, which brings into focus some of the interesting things Africans do in areas such as travel, fashion, art, music, etc, to a global audience. Given his position, it would be fair to say that Madowo’s voice carries some heft.
Madowo was included in a list of inspirational Africans compiled by Kenya Airways. He’d later tweet, “My job is to cover Africa accurately, not positively.”
He expounded on the point to say that he makes sure every story he does portrays Africans as being beyond disease, drought and war and having accomplishments, art, beauty, innovation, and so on.
To my mind, I think this disclosure was instructive. There have been growing debates about the role of the African journalist, particularly in how they tell Africa’s stories. In 2015, Nancy Kacungira, an award-winning Ugandan journalist, spoke to the BBC about her dilemma in telling stories. “I cannot tell the African story”, she said. She argued then that Africa was too diverse a continent with over a billion people and thousands of languages. Western reportage about conflict, she noted, seemed to focus on Africa as a continent perpetually at war, creating a negative stereotype. Conflicts in other regions, on the other hand, tended to be more country-specific, which clearly shows a bias.
An op-ed from January 2023 notes: “A study, ‘Africa in the Media’, that was conducted by Africa No Filter and The African Narrative in 2019, looked at how Africa was covered in the US media. The report analyzed over 700,000 hours of news and entertainment media in the US, and the findings form the basis of this reflective piece. It found out that Africa was broadly depicted negatively and as a country and not a continent with 54 countries. It also found that after politics (32%), crime had the most mentions (16%), and over one-third (35%) of African mentions in scripted entertainment were about crime. In scripted entertainment, 44% of TV shows only mention ‘Africa’, with no reference to a particular country.”
Given this background, new questions arise. And I’m not sure how the answers go. Do we adopt Harvey’s approach and focus on the good stories only? Or do we broadly appeal to accuracy instead, as Madowo suggests?
You dictate the news. Garbage in, garbage out
I agree that, to a large extent, the media is compelling in shaping narrative. And yes, we know how to get you talking about one issue for a long time. But here’s a fact: We only amplify the stories you want to read. If it feels like the news cycle is negative, that’s because it’s responding to the “aggregate demand” of the masses. I will prove this to you with two examples.
The first is from April, when the Nigerian government approved a malaria vaccine from Oxford University, making Nigeria the second country in the world, after Ghana, to grant that approval. The vaccine has a 75% efficacy and prevents malaria in children between 5 months and 36 months.
Malaria is a killer disease. In 2021, 96% of the world's malaria deaths occurred in Africa. According to the WHO, in that same year, four African countries accounted for just over half of all malaria deaths worldwide: Nigeria (31.3%), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (12.6%), Tanzania (4.1%) and Niger (3.9%).
So news of a powerful malaria vaccine should be celebrated wildly, yes? And you’d expect it to dominate news headlines just as the world was ecstatic about a COVID-19 vaccine. But most Nigerians were, understandably, focused on the aftermath of the elections. Every other thing took a backseat. There’s only so much the media can do. If the people say election-related news is all that matters, that’s what media houses will offer.
The second example is more recent and concerns an allegation of a Nigerian student who the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, says forged her result to produce the highest score of 362 in the UTME. Although the newspapers broke the story, social media gave it fire, and soon enough, it became all everyone could talk about. Just two days ago, I turned on my TV to see that it was the leading topic of discussion on a popular channel by a popular TV host. It wasn’t lost on me that a teenager had become the week’s cynosure and was the subject of political and ethnic squabbles on Twitter.
While the girl’s case was gathering all the attention, the person verified by JAMB to be the highest scorer got relegated to the background. There was the option of allowing the authorities to proceed with their investigation while focusing attention and adulation on the other lady verified to be the highest scorer. But our eyes were fixated on a scandal.
The lesson is obvious: Bad news sells. And that happens because there’s a willing market for it. This maxim is what birthed another famous media aphorism, namely, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Anything related to disaster and gore leads the news for a long time.
Conclusion
For the journalist, this creates a feedback loop that subconsciously seeps into how we pitch and tell our stories. You find yourself looking for the “interesting” angle. “Interesting” here is a euphemism for the “shock and awe” stuff, the type that “unearths something sinister” because it’s unlikely to win a journalism prize or a grant for telling a “feel-good” story.
In my coverage of the elections, I suffered mentally, having to digest and disseminate news of electoral violence. At one point, I had to excuse myself from work because it affected my mood. I’d learn later that there’s a term for this—“doomscrolling”.
It describes endlessly scrolling through and consuming accurate and essential but negative news. The National Library of Medicine says it can affect one’s mental health and is linked to “increased distress, anxiety and depression, even when the news in question is relatively mundane.”
It’s a Catch-22 situation for which there are no easy answers. On my part, I’ve tried to incorporate a couple of “good stories” into my work, even at the risk that it may not do as many numbers. I don’t mind. As I see it, there’s enough bad news to go around. What would it hurt to do something different and offer a ray of sunshine amid all the gloom?
So my admonition to you today is to take time off your phone screens if the news is too strong for your liking. Good things are still happening all around. You’re probably too beclouded by all the sad stuff that you’re not seeing them.
It might take some effort, but it’s there. So while it’s unavoidably true that times are hard, someone in Nigeria broke a world record in marathon cooking. Another Nigerian woman went to study in China and emerged as the university’s best-graduating student and delivered a valedictory speech in fluent Chinese. A footballer from the slums of Lagos became a prince in faraway Naples after leading his team to their first football title in 33 years.
As I like to remind you, this newsletter was founded on a simple premise—to offer hope. By God, I will do my best to do that even when I have to report on the bad stuff. And if there’s anything you should take away as I mark the second anniversary of this newsletter, it’s a rephrasing of Angus Harvey’s earlier quote: “When we only read the stories of doom, we fail to see the stories of possibility.”
Quality writing. One I've always admired. I can't imagine what the work of a journalist looks like. That's considering the "bad" stuffs tend to do the best numbers. But it's relieving to know that there are people like you out there, willing to cover the "good" stuffs too. You keep giving us those good stuffs anytime you can. This is a piece relatable to our everyday lives as well. And how we think of ourselves. The information we choose to consume (accept). Thank you for putting this one together.
Happy belated birthday.