The government spokesman, Gerson Msigwa, has dismissed two news articles as fake ones, but were they? First, EU News reported that ATC’s application to fly in the EU was declined because of failures to meet international security guidelines.
Secondly, the local daily had a one-on-one interview with the Tanzania Railway Corporation (TRC) boss, who informed them a hybrid of electric and diesel train engines was in the pipeline to address erratic power that has made electric trains get stranded more normally than a misnomer.
Surprisingly, the government spokesman dismissed both pieces of news from two different sources as fake news.
Could the authorities exploit “fake news” to suppress the news they dislike? This article looks at this question and others to understand what is happening.
Despots worldwide perspire to limit access to information, citing national security or propaganda from foreign threats to justify closures or throttling the content of media organisations and advocacy groups. Fighting “fake news” has also emboldened autocrats to trespass public rights to access information.
Such governments cite the unforeseeable risks but rarely try to prove them in a manner that will make an average person appreciate the logic behind the curtailment of their rights.
Access to information is a vital ingredient to free speech, and it provides the framework of democracy, the rule of law, and good governance.
Pre-emptive attacks against access to information often lean on national security to justify curbing citizenship rights to free speech, harming the operation of democracy.
A correct measure to such policy decisions ought to weigh in on the trade-off between government covetous intentions of denial of access to information and whether real national security threats even exist.
READ RELATED: The Truth Behind Political Fake News: Who’s Manipulating Us?
Regimes may limit access to information for reasons which have to do with the content they don’t like that expose them to poor governance, embezzlement of public funds, official graft, sheer incompetence and palpable nepotism.
In all this, governments may employ national security as a cover-up to avoid public accountability. Governments often restrict free speech and access to information because they find the content irksome or exposing their weaknesses.
The values undergird by free speech point to the avoidance of censorship, which aims to shield governments from public accountability for the policies, actions, and decisions they pursue.
Governments ought to know censorship is a form of insidious manipulation. Paternalistic speech regulation is an example of state manipulation of access to information.
In the case of Moody v. NetChoice, LLC, writing for the unanimous ruling of the US Supreme Court, Justice Elena Kagan said: “….there are few greater than allowing the government to change the speech of private actors to achieve its own conception of speech nirvana.”
In this ruling, the US Supreme Court rejected the argument that state legislators could override the US social media platforms’ content moderation decisions to correct perceived bias against conservatives.
Where foreign nations are involved, anti-paternalistic reasoning is often dismissed as irrelevant to ensure that state-sponsored censorship rules the day.
Part of the confusion is when governments advance manipulation of perceived adversaries to cover up their own manipulation.
The stratagem is easier to grasp: by assailing those they despise, governments hope their gross misconduct will be overlooked!
Attack becomes a defensive posturing.
In reality, the free speech trespassers that are governments masquerade as the protectors of their own citizens against imaginary foreign enemies and manipulative fake news!
Individuals and media companies are targeted to exercise discriminatory tendencies. All that is ignored in the name of safeguarding governments against those who want to harm them.
Policymakers on the governments who may be behaving wrongly apply censorship to cover their tracks in the name of protecting national security.
Parliaments engage in censorship when they create media laws that are designed to limit access to information, citing national security, decency, incitement, distortions from false news and similar reasoning.
Governments have a role in regulating powerful media companies from exploiting their control media over important speech platforms in manners that compromise the integrity of public debates, associations and critiques.
When a law targets only one media company or cherry-picked individuals, there is a high risk it is motivated by displeasure with a specific editorial perspective rather than by the health of the public sphere writ large.
This is the harsh reality. Media laws should encourage vibrant debates and not be used by parliaments to curb those intricate values.
Why did the Tanzania Government spokesperson mislead the general public?
By declaring the two credible pieces of news as false news, the aim was to protect his employer from negative publicity, and the gospel truth became its chief casualty.
International news reported that Air Tanzania did not meet international safety regulations, but the government spokesman disputed that.
He claimed that was untrue, albeit he shot himself in the knee when he said the EU regulators would visit Tanzania early next year over the same issue.
The impression he had contextualised was ATC had never made such an application to fly to the EU.
Then, he capitulated that the process was ongoing. His listeners must have been perturbed because if ATC never made that application to fly in EU space, why should their regulators pay us a visit?
They could only pay us a visit if they received our application. I envisage no other reason why they should pay us a courtesy call.
On the issue of hybrid diesel-electric engines, it’s difficult to fathom why the government spokesman would shield his employer.
The news generously raised the stature of the government.
I say so, because there is a niggling problem involving power failures that are interfering with the smooth travelling logistics of the SGR electric train.
Frequent power cuts have led to the train getting stranded many times causing untold hardships to its travellers.
Makes a lot of sense to seek a hybrid solution that will proffer technical options when power failures are experienced.
When electricity is unavailable, the diesel engine kicks off automatically, providing the much-needed power to make a journey uninterrupted.
Strangely, it was this technical solstice that the government spokesman was scampering away from and dismissed as “fake news”!
The government spokesman conceded that there were quagmires in the electric trains, but the solutions were not available through retrogressive dint such as diesel engines!
In his own words this is what he had said, “……kwenye treni zinazotumia diseli huko tulitoka hatuwezi kurudi…”
Partly, he could be right if we took cognisance of what the then TLR before resorting to TRC had promised.
TLR had promised hybrid train engines that combined electricity and batteries.
It was really heading in the right direction, but when these train engines were procured, it had only electric train options.
No excuses were forthcoming to explain why apt solutions were abandoned for problem-prone ones.
Had the government spokesman indicated the hybrid solution that was in consideration was not the diesel one but an electric battery one, we would have understood.
Electricity, when available, charges the batteries that act as standby power and automatically supply power when there is an electricity outage.
The government spokesman had applied different criteria to identify “fake news”.
First, he assailed the objectivity of the news, which was a misleading approach. News is not fake because it is senseless or unprofitable. News is fake if it is untrue, period.
Both news in question were not fake because they were sourced from credible news outlets.
Second, the spokesman did not address credibility of the sources of such news.
That was a mistake! The credibility of sources of news is paramount, if not the most important variable, in the determination of the veracity of the news itself.
In both cases, the news was sourced from credible outlets. Credible news outlets have the motivation to report the truth. It is their reputation that is at stake.
That alone should have quashed any insinuations of “fake news.”
Last, the government spokesman fell into the usual trap of labelling news authorities disliked as “fake news”. This should worry many who agitate for democratic reforms.
Once news is shunned as “fake news” simply because authorities despise its content for exposing the regime’s weaknesses, that alone amounts to official censorship aiming to discredit the truth in a forlorn hope to protect a lie that shields regimes from accountability.
“Fake news” shouldn’t be parlayed to strangulate the truth or manipulate it to suit authorities’ narratives.
The author is political oriented. The government spokesman well understood by every Tanzanian except the author of the fake news!