AMLC

AMLC 2010

Francis Mdlongwa’s welcome address at the opening of the 9th Africa Media Leadership Conference

27 September 2010, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

 I would like to warmly welcome all of you, both new and old faces, to our ninth Africa Media Leadership Conference. I am fully aware that all of you are very busy people with hectic work schedules back home, so we

appreciate your presence here. Your presence in Dar es Salaam is clear testimony that you value this conference series as a key platform to exchange views, ideas and knowledge about key media leadership challenges that face us in our rapidly changing world. This year I have decided to depart from my usual style of making a major commentary during this welcome address on the deliberations of the conference because there are many others who are here with us today who will do that better than me.

Having said that, I hope that the Dar es Salaam conference will find time to tackle, alongside the critical financial sustainability and profitability issues, what economists call “externalities”. These are unintended or unforeseen consequences of operations of companies on the environment. We live in an age that is increasingly concerned not just about the impact of activities of any company on the environment and climate change, but on whether companies are accountable and responsible for the impact of these activities on humankind. In other words, as part of our corporate social responsibility (CSR) are we, as heads of media companies gathered here today, concerned at all about the impact of the depletion of a large number of trees that are being moved down cross the world so that the pulp and paper industry can supply newspapers with newsprint?

But more importantly, what are we doing about owning up to this problem and doing something about the depletion of trees which sustain our industry? Has anyone here heard of a media company that has taken it upon itself to plant trees as a way of redressing this issue? But the example I have given here is one of a foreseen externality, which cries out for obvious action from us all who run newspapers.

The more distant externality would be the impact of our content – here I mean radio and television programmes and news stories – on audiences whom we serve. Is there not enough evidence yet that some people among our audiences either commit an outright crime or some other anti-social act after consuming our content? What would a news organisation hope to achieve when it interviews a criminal who threatens mayhem on others, as happened recently in one African country?

An example of an unintended externality would be a child, who after watching a James and Bondstyle movie or some similar programme on our tv and internet or mobile phone screens, tries to emulate this in real-life, and so often with disastrous consequences.

What about our news coverage which, for example, results in a good listed company losing much of its value because of an inaccurate story we would have published or broadcast? Beyond running the usual corrections, which we try to hide by publishing them somewhere on page 20, have we ever considered that we have an ethical and moral responsibility beyond running the corrections for causing so much havoc to those whom we would have offended, including the larger public? These are the unforeseen or unintended impacts of our operations.

Please don’t get me wrong. I am not in any way supporting any governmental action on the media to right these wrongs – God forbid we have enough of these already, and South Africa is regrettably following on this slippery path that can only stifle a free and vibrant media and democracy .

But I am asking you, the media leaders of Africa, to begin to critically examine whether your institution -- as a transparent, accountable and responsible plank of democracy, which we claim to be - needn’t be seriously considering bolder and more visible measures to put its house in order. If we don’t do this on our own in an age where audiences are increasingly and rightly demanding greater transparency, accountability and responsibility by all sectors but especially ours, we leave ourselves open to being subjected to statutory regulation to ensure that we address these and many other externalities that stem from our activities and operations.

The new ethically-based CSR programmes of all companies operating in the more open 21st century must ensure that all firms willingly address, in real concrete and visible terms, the externalities that they knowingly and unknowingly cause if companies, including the media, are to operate sustainably and in the public interest.

Thank you.

ENDS