Have Media Abandoned Their Social Responsibility? (speech full text)

By Professor Wilfred Mlay
  
I
think that this question deserves no time for reflection,
introspection, research, or field work. It requires no analysis. Just
go to any place in Africa, any household, any small township, any
church, any media house. Listen to any coffee conversation, tiptoe into
any academic or lecture hall and ask them what are the issues, the
concerns, and immediately it will be apparent to you that in this
society there is a great need of someone with some responsibility. To
put it another way, someone has abdicated his responsibility for
society.
 
Look at the mass poverty around us. The Millennium Development Goals
should be achieved in 2015. Yet in Sub-Saharan Africa poverty has
increased over the last seven years. There has been some improvement
here and there, but overall poverty is on the increase. Africa has more
orphans today than at any other time. We in the media are publishing
child abuse, corruption and bad governance. Some extremely rich people
are living side by side with the extremely poor in the same nation.
This is a society in dire need of someone to take responsibility.
 
My key argument is that actually we do need the church, the academia
and media, to each play a rightful role in society for there to be
wholeness, and when these three entities or institutions are playing
their rightful role they will be able to tame a fourth institution —
politics. Then it will be possible to provide opportunity for social
progress and development. These four entities are like four poles, and
society is the arena on which they play. When there are good checks and
balances between the four, then society progresses. This is where we
find most of our industrialized countries in the Western world making
progress.
 
When we talk of social responsibility in the Christian context, I
cannot but think about creation in its very essence. God created heaven
and earth and looked and saw that everything was good, and he created
man and woman after his own image (Gen. 1), and he gave them authority
over everything he had created. God gave social, economic, political,
and physical responsibility to man over all creation, which includes
the people who were to come, because he said multiply and increase and
fill the earth. Social responsibility is a mandate given by God to man.
Now man organizes the society and decides to develop institutions. Each
institution has its role to ensure that this mandate is being
fulfilled. Whatever society you go to, there are these institutions to
ensure that this mandate is fulfilled.