If there is one thing we Ghanaians love more than a hot bowl of fufu and light soup on a Sunday afternoon, it is a good scandal.
Our social media timelines are a chaotic mix of profound political debates, hilarious memes, and absolute outrage. But in this digital age, have you ever stopped to wonder who is curating your outrage?
Before we explore the dark arts of media manipulation, we need to define what “real news” actually is in this context. Real news comprises the substantive, heavily impactful issues of national importance. It is the news that dictates the cost of living, the safety of our citizens, and the integrity of our institutions.
These are the issues that affect our daily survival. Yet, what was dominating the Twitter spaces and TikTok feeds by mid-February? The “Russian man wahala.”
For the uninitiated, the internet was set ablaze by the sensational case of a Russian man who visited African countries, had sex with countless women, taped the whole thing without their knowledge, and sold the videos online. It was a vile violation of privacy and a serious criminal matter.
However, the ensuing debate on social media morphed into a massive, sensationalized spectacle. We debated morality, gullibility, and dating culture for days on end. Meanwhile, traditional outlets like the Daily Graphic and state broadcasters were still trying to catch up, running their standard political pieces while the digital youth were entirely consumed by the scandal.
Happenstance vs. Coordinated Effort
Let us be fair. The timing of the Russian man scandal was pure happenstance. The internet algorithm loves sex, scandal, and foreigners behaving badly. Sometimes, a distraction is simply a coincidence. A wild story breaks naturally exactly when a politician messes up, and the powers that be just breathe a sigh of relief.
But other times, it is not an accident. It is a well-oiled, highly coordinated effort by the political elite and politically exposed persons (those wealthy industrialists with powerful friends whom they sponsor). When real news threatens their empire, they do not just wait for a distraction; they manufacture one.
The Play-by-Play of Burying the News
Let us draw a fictional timeline to see how this plays out in real life.
Imagine it is Tuesday morning. Breaking news drops that a key society figure, a billionaire industrialist known for funding political campaigns, has been arrested at a European airport for transporting illegal drugs. The evidence is solid. The public is furious.
- 10:00 AM: Panic ensues in the corridors of power. The party machinery realizes that if this drug story stays on the airwaves, heads will roll.
- 12:00 PM: The crisis management team convenes. They need a distraction. They scan the environment for any simmering controversy that can be weaponized.
- 2:00 PM: The drop. A politically affiliated blog suddenly leaks an audio clip of a beloved celebrity insulting a rival, or they amplify a bizarre, scandalous rumor.
- 4:00 PM: The influencer army is activated. Social media personalities, whose lavish lifestyles are quietly funded by these same elites, receive their talking points. They flood X and TikTok with hot takes about the leaked audio.
- Day 2: The morning radio shows, caught in the web of social media trends, dedicate their prime time to discussing the celebrity feud. The drug bust? It is relegated to a tiny column on page four of the newspapers.
News Cycles and the Attention Economy
This strategy works perfectly because of our incredibly short attention spans. The modern news cycle is relentless. Consumers gorge on information, chew it up, and spit it out within hours. When you link this short attention span to the sheer speed at which trends evolve, redirecting public attention becomes entirely predictable.
Sensationalism acts like a shiny object. The case of the Russian man and his hidden cameras was naturally sticky because it contained all the elements of a thriller. Political strategists study this exact phenomenon. They know that a complex story about inflation or COCOBOD’s syndicated loans requires cognitive effort to understand. A scandal involving sex tapes and hidden cameras requires zero effort to consume.
The Distraction Playbook: A Mock Manual
If you are a party-owned media outlet, a state-sponsored broadcaster, or a hired influencer looking to bury an issue of national importance, here is your step-by-step instructional manual.
- Step 1: Identify the Threat. Is the public asking too many questions about why there is a $150 million loss at COCOBOD? Acknowledge the danger immediately.
- Step 2: Deploy the Decoy. Find a highly sensational issue. If you strike gold with a situation like the Russian man secretly filming local women, use it. The mix of foreign exploitation, local victims, and sexual scandal is the ultimate clickbait.
- Step 3: Feed the Trolls. Instruct your influencer network to take extreme, polarizing stances on the decoy issue. Polarization breeds engagement. Have some influencers attack the morality of the victims, while others attack the foreigner. If the entire country is arguing about dating choices, they are not arguing about the national deficit.
- Step 4: Starve the Real News. Ensure your affiliated traditional media platforms focus heavily on the decoy. Frame the sensational story as an issue of “national moral decay” to justify endless hours of airtime. Ignore the economic indicators completely.
- Step 5: Ride the Wave. Wait 48 hours. By then, the public will be exhausted from the outrage cycle and will have completely forgotten what they were angry about in the first place.
In the end, surviving the Ghanaian media landscape requires a healthy dose of skepticism. We must learn to separate the noise from the signal, or we will forever be dancing to a tune played by unseen hands.
As the brilliant media critic Neil Postman once noted in his book ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’, “What afflicts the people… is not that they are laughing instead of thinking, but that they do not know what they are laughing about and why they have stopped thinking.”
About the author
Dominic Makafui Kepomey is currently pursuing a Master of Arts degree in Global Communication with a focus on Politics and Society at the Faculty of Philosophy, Universität Erfurt.
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DISCLAIMER: The Views, Comments, Opinions, Contributions and Statements made by Readers and Contributors on this platform do not necessarily represent the views or policy of Multimedia Group Limited.
Source: www.myjoyonline.com