No News is Good News?

The United Nations’ special representative for Somalia, Mr. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, has compared the role of Somalia's media with the infamous radio station that was used to incite participation in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. A day after Mr. Ould-Abdallah’s remarks, Islamist gunmen shot and killed Said Tahlil Ahmed, the director of independent HornAfrik Radio in Mogadishu, in broad daylight in the Somali capital. Last week, Human Rights Watch called on Ould-Abdallah to immediately retract his statement.

"What happened is to divert attention from what is going on here and, as usual, to use the media to repeat 'Radio Mille Collines' (The Rwandan Radio Station), to repeat the genocide in Rwanda," the U.N. Represntative said. Somalia journalists have called the comparison “insulting, ignorant and dangerous.”

Amidst an escalating war of words, Somalia’s radio stations have agreed not to air live sermons by Muslim clerics or live news conferences or interviews by insurgent groups in an effort to avoid promoting their political agendas -- which to date have been blamed for contributing to Somalia’s violence.

Throughout all of this, one cannot help but consider what seems to be unbridled power that exists in the hands of those few un-elected individuals who possess the ability to influence the actions of so many. Even in the U.S., there are those who profess that the media has gained too much power . . . playing an unprecedented role in last fall’s Presidential election. There are those who say the media -- both liberal as well as conservative -- selected their U.S. Presidential Candidate and then worked to “sell” that candidate to the electorate. A friend of mine even recently suggested that those working in the media be re-labled. “No longer can it be said these people are reporters,” my friend said. “Instead, they are ‘sales people’ . . . men and women who are trying to sell to the public something which is in the better interest of the news corporation."