HARD LINES
By: Adeyemi Ibrahim
Online, there are lineup of lines that make the headlines of our societal social media platforms. So many people say so many things that are ill-lines. Social vices have taken over our social media. Distorters are mistaken for reporters. Everybody is now called a journalist, editor and/or a writer. Our correspondents are no more respondents to real reporting. Post-truth is masqueraded as the truth.
In the news rooms of most of our media houses, reporters are bought with brown envelopes. They no more report to make impart but to have their parts of the partial cakes, baked by the men of the national parastatals. What we believe nowadays are the doubts of the so-called journalists. Why?
Most of the lines on our social media are just too feverish to be called headlines. Those lines are what Gbemisola Adeoti, a Nigerian poet, called “hard lines.” In his lines, he poetically posited that “Some lines are bitter pills, hard to swallow with laughter, like a tongue licking a weeping sore, to douse embers of thirst.” In this social festal era, there is a festival of news fever. So many news lead stories are sick; they suffer from what we call journalistic malnutrition, validity viruses, legal leprosy and memorable madness.
Social journalism is a daughter of the social media. The need to permeate and pervade information across the world, the need to connect or disconnect with people and most especially, the need to do some social networking have necessitated the emergence of the social media. Saddening enough however, moron barons running the barony of our societal barriers are basically showcasing barbarism through what is called social journalism.
Have you heard about the social media madness? In my room, inside Dundaye University, a friend, whose name I’ll like to make a sacrificial lamb of the oeuvre of my fact, was deeply asleep one faithful midnight, groaning and snoring like a hungry pig, yet, gesticulating his fingers as though he was chatting on Facebook, Whatsapp or even Twitter. When he was tapped with a mortal slap on his cheek, he sleep-talked, saying: “Let’s take selfie.”
The phenomenon of social media madness is beyond the story I narrated up there. What you post on the platforms tells whom you are_ sane or insane, mannered or ill-mannered. The social media has now become a public toilet where everyone positions their anuses to drop the bad sides of themselves. Nowadays, pictures are doctored to repaint stories. Thousands of headlines are nothing but hard lines. Bloggers are now floggers of facts. They post and share the hard lines just to generate unnecessary traffic for themselves.
Around the globe, global leaders are leading the world with lies and falsehood. Media houses are bought and owned with mere money. The fact is fictionalised and the fiction is made factual. Fake news is the breaking news of most of our media organisations. The world itself does not appreciate the truthful ones. Everyone is proud of being a bally liar. The Lord of the world detests liars, but the world rejects it aversively.
On our campus, the left-overs of what happens in the real world are the carry-overs of what the supposed campus writers and righters exhibit. The campus distorters are mistaken for campus reporters as well. Those who are well-read fail to appear online, while the ill-read ones are always online, fabricating lines that are capable of setting their careers ablaze. Reportorial and editorial competencies are completely compromised in our so-called editors. Editors who are supposed to be eagle-eyed are one-eyed and even the surviving eye is fully infected with pus. The man has died in them long before they were born.
They are social media scavengers, what they forage is not food but cheap fame. They want to be known even where they are not worth to be known. They are journalistic ants trying to find their ways in the nostrils of the elephants. They write what they don’t know and know what they don’t write.
Well, there are anecdotes to restructure lines that have not been uttered from the rooms of our orifices, but when they’re said, they’re said to be said everywhere. Rumours pervade more than the rejoinder. Whatever lines we make tell the world what we are made of. It is best to let’s mind our lines of thoughts so as to avoid hard lines.