BEWARE OF RED HERRINGS

Another electioneering period is imminent if not ongoing and the politicians and their spokespersons are doing all they can in earnest to muddy the waters to make it impossible for the ordinary voter to make out the woods from the trees as far as; what is wrong or right, who is speaking the truth or lying, what works and what does not, who is being practical and who is being idealistic, etc are concerned. This they do to ensure that, the ordinary voter is left with no choice in the whole perplexity but to vote based almost solely on the basis of emotional appeal. This becomes the most convenient path of choice to arrive at a candidate of ones preference due to a consciously controlled atmosphere brought about by several millions of Ghana Cedis worth of advertisements and works of ‘spin doctors’ thrown at voters; ironically with their own money which some of these politicians have rapaciously accumulated by we all know what means.

Due to this overwhelming air of sentimentality created through tons of effective apple polishing and wishful thinking to whisk the populace onto the bandwagon of some these political charlatans, it becomes almost impossible even sometimes  for those who are professionally trained, for instance journalists, to distinguish between the hard hitting realities of the day and the paradise of phantasmagoria which is proclaimed by almost all of these politicians exclusively for the parochial aim of attaining political office. One of these major problems which our workers in the media if they can work at overcoming in this electioneering period would go a long way to serve the public good is the instance of Red Herrings (smokescreens) being thrown around with careless abandon by leaders of major political factions in their perpetual effort to always evade the concrete issues bedeviling this dear country of ours.

One might think of the Smokescreen (red herring) as the “attention span” fallacy since it works best on listeners and readers who are unable to stay focused on an issue when they are tempted by distractions. These days, when politicians and other public figures dodge hard questions, they are generally allowed to get away with it. How long has it been since you heard a reporter say, “But sir, you didn’t answer the question!” probably even longer than it’s been since you heard a politician give a direct answer to a hard question. We’ve all heard it said that the media and the people they interview are interdependent-that is, they each depend on the other and have fundamentally the same interests (at the highest government and corporate levels), and that accounts for the easy treatment officials often get from interviews. But it may also be true that reporters themselves are prone to fall for the fallacy in question here. They are too likely to move onto the next question on their list when the public would be better served by a pointed follow –up question on an issue that has just been ducked (Brooke et al, 2004). This I think is a serious failure and damaging to the public good.

It is therefore both a professional and a moral imperative that, in their quest to be accorded the status of the fourth arm of government, our media houses and their personnel work at putting a serious check on this development and others of its kind in order to be in the position to provide an effective supplementary mechanism of checks and balances as far as the three already established arms of government are concerned for the betterment of our motherland.

 Article written by Jason Tutu

Any Grammatical error should be directed to him and not www.inewsgh.blogspot.com

Thank you

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