No, Journalists do not have to play nice.

I titled this article the way I did to spare anyone reluctant to read something disagreeable by answering from the beginning. That said, hear me out.

I’m not saying they have to be mean or insult guests but they do not owe public servants niceties when seeking truth and trying to hold them accountable.

Why are we eager to label journalists as rude or unprofessional when they refuse to back down when engaging with an interviewee that becomes unnecessarily defensive or combative?

What prompted my thoughts was the recent exchange on ARISE TV between hosts, Rufai Oseni and Tundun with Former Minister, Adebayo Shittu on the APC Muslim-Muslim Ticket and other internal drama within the party. I’ll share the trigger statement below.

Tundun: A lot of people would be buoyed by your confidence…

Mr Adebayo Shittu: Why are you attacking my confidence? What is your problem with my confidence?

Tundun stood her ground and maintained that the word “Buoy’ isn’t negative. At a point, said, “Maybe we need a dictionary.”

Voices went up a few notches but this exchange is all it took for some people to say that the guys at Arise TV are unprofessional and biased.

It’s funny because many people who said this did so without any real understanding of what journalism ethics are. You can say that they put you off but to say they were unprofessional? It’s laughable.

I also noticed that many people think journalists have to be neutral.

No, they don’t.

What Nigerians qualify as bad journalism is any kind of journalistic conduct that offends their sensibilities and not whether it is based on truth. Essentially, journalists always have to play nice.

But where has that gotten us?

It’s gotten us to a point where in response to valid questions by journalists, Public Servants respond by asking, “Who is bankrolling you?”

It’s gotten us to a point where people value faux-politeness over truth.

It’s gotten us to a point where people no longer trust mainstream media. I mean, someone on Twitter reeled off names of a bunch of veterans/retired NTA newscasters as a pointer to the bygone good days of good journalism. Other than the fact that they’re newscasters who largely appeal to people based on their good diction and delivery, those people worked for a state-owned broadcasting service.

Is politely delivering propaganda and cowing to powerful politicians now the standard for good journalism?

Do people even know that there are different kinds of journalistic approaches? By the looks of it, no.

And this is where I’d like to mention that there is such a thing as Adversarial Journalism and someone called Greenwald.

American journalist, Glenn Greenwald is famous as the Guardian (UK) journalist who reported Edward Snowden’s revelations about the surveillance of citizens by America’s National Security Agency (NSA). In 2013, he left the Guardian and decided to join a new independent journalistic venture financed by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. He’s moved on to other things from there,

Why am I mentioning this guy?

Well, Greenwald is an avid proponent of adversarial journalism. He believes it can hold “the most powerful factions accountable, fearlessly, and without regard to threats or repercussions from the government or corporate factions.”

While there may be a standard model for journalists to be impartial and this is now generally seen as good journalism, this ‘standard’ has also produced lots of atrocious journalism and some toxic habits that are weakening the profession.

For Greenwald, the ‘neutrality’ formula of ‘here’s-what-both-sides-say-and-I-won’t-resolve-the-conflicts’ and an inability of journalists to openly take a definitive stand on what’s true, often rewards dishonesty on the part of political and corporate officials who know they can rely on ‘neutral’ reporters to amplify their falsehoods without challenge

In his words, “This suffocating constraint on how reporters are permitted to express themselves produces a self-neutering form of journalism that becomes as ineffectual as it is boring.

Worst of all, this model rests on a false conceit. Human beings are not objectivity-driven machines. We all intrinsically perceive and process the world through subjective prisms. What is the value in pretending otherwise?”

Now, I’m not saying that there’s no room for neutrality. I’d be foolish to say that, especially as someone who has two degrees in communication and years of experience as both a field reporter and editor. I even published an academic research paper on journalism ethics.

However, based on the preceding paragraphs, there is obviously more than one journalistic approach. I’m also of the opinion that honestly disclosing, rather than hiding one’s subjective values can produce a more honest and trustworthy form of journalism.

Above all, no journalism — from the most stylistically ‘objective’ to the most brazenly opinionated (like David Hundeyin’s) — has any real value unless it is grounded in facts, evidence, and verifiable data.

So, no, journalists do not always have to play nice and they shouldn’t be branded as unprofessional for not doing so. The Watergate Scandal wasn’t uncovered by taking kid gloves into the journalistic ring.