File this under “TIL”: In the early ’80s, virtually all of the high-level Black journalists working in U.S. broadcast news moved to Lagos as part of an effort to overhaul Nigeria’s state-owned television news network. With help from many of those journalists, Feven Merid pieces together what happened. Read it now, because it’s hard to think there won’t be a movie or podcast about this soon.
For as long as Nwobodo had worked at the network, the news had depicted the government only in images and terms sanctioned by officials; newscasters typically thought of themselves as civil service workers. “You take everything you hear on the news with a hefty, hefty pinch of salt,” she said. A critical portrayal of a bureaucrat could result in trouble for NTA staff. Nwobodo saw colleagues lose their jobs for even subtle criticisms. “You didn’t try that,” she said. “We knew a lot of the stories that we had to read were not in the public interest. But you want a job, you want to put bread on the table, so you don’t have a choice.” The presence of the Americans inspired a different outlook. “The Jacaranda intervention was a complete eye-opener to me,” she said. “We thought, ‘We haven’t been doing this right the entire time.’”
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