All across the World, despotic regimes use their power and rarely the appropriate legal processes with the hope of intimidating and silencing the independent media that are disclosing inconvenient truths, which are in the public interest.
These legal threats and actions are crippling not only the media but democracies everywhere. However, what is obviously unattainable is no number of threats and intimidation can silence the media.
The recent shutting down by the Civil Law Court of Montserrado County of Spoon FM/TV is the crux of our position here.
To be candid, the form and manner in which the government shutdown Spoon FM was absolutely unorthodox. Unorthodox because the government’s action was arbitrary since it neither complain nor file a lawsuit against the radio station for whatever ethical transgression it must have committed.
To put it bluntly, the manner and form of the shutdown was completely outside the due course of the law.
Is the Coalition for Democratic Change (CDC)-led Administration forgetting so soon that when it was in opposition, it lambasted former President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and her Administration for arbitrarily shutting down the Chronicle Newspaper, suing FrontPageAfrica and also shutting down a radio station that was owned and operated by Henry Costa?
The 1986 Constitution of Liberia provides for freedoms of speech and the press, but these rights are often restricted in actual practice. The case with the Spoon FM Radio station is a classic example of these restrictions on free speech and press freedom.
The only crime that we know the Spoon network, operator of the radio station, had committed is, it asked questions about the purpose of the President’s recent visit to Israel and also speculated that President George Weah returned home with Israeli IT specialists to tamper with the electoral systems as Liberia prepares for Legislative and Presidential Elections on October 10 this year.
While we disagree with the Spoon Network on such a grave allegation without providing any shred of evidence, we maintain that the manner and form in which Spoon FM was shutdown was an act of intimidation and restriction on free speech and press freedom.
What is even more shocking about the government’s action is, CDCians have over the years of President Weah’s presidency boasted that this President has not sent a journalist to prison and/or shutdown a radio station or a newspaper. So, the one-million-dollar question is, why now?
If the government’s action was an attempt to silence the media, we can safely say that it has made a sad mistake because with all its power and might, it cannot silence the independent media.
One thing that must also be clear to this government and governments to come is, it is not the business of the media to please politicians and governments, but to hold them accountable. It is this power of the media that makes politicians and governments uneasy. They wish they had the power to silence the media, but they don’t and will never have such power to silence the media.
