PressEthic

I'll freely admit I only read this because "beer" was in the headline.

I'll also freely admit I don't know who Ndaeyo Uko is. But I like the way he thinks.

Take his response to the idea that "every political landscape begets its own kind of media."

True. But I think that the political landscape does not determine the people's needs. Newspapers have to start responding to the people's needs. Newspapers are products. Let's say you were selling beer; whether you are a democrat or a dictator doesn't change the beer taste.

People will buy beer that tastes good, that addresses their own needs. If beer weren't like something that makes you feel good, they wouldn't buy it. You need to make people rely on that newspaper to live safe, secure lives.

First of all, the alcohol reference will get you every time. Here, it should wake us up to concepts we've become desensitized to, like "liberal media." They've become these trite abstractions that may or may not exist; if we could agree they exist, then we disagree on what to do next.

He's teaching journalists fighting government control what a free press is, from the beginning. The accessibility of his ideas (and the fact that, arguably, we have some government control issues of our own) makes him needed just as badly here.

The difference may be that journalists like Uko have had to fight for the chance to do their jobs the right way, and not in the historic "our fathers' fathers' fathers" way we know here. Western journalistic tenets stand for the people, but maybe that's become another abstraction.

Journalists around the world like Uko are constantly reminded why they have jobs - the people need them. And that trumps political persuasion.