By Katdapba Yunana Gobum
For those who write, you must be aware defamation has landed many in trouble.
It has not stopped yet, so long as we think it is a ‘right’ to pry into the lives of people.
As a Journalist, one of the realities you must be at home with is to make sure your stories do not have a thread of aftertale.
No matter how ‘factual’ or ‘convincing’ they are written; once you cannot proof its veracity, save yourself by dropping it before it gets out.
So long as it was meant to tarnish the reputation or standing of another person, there is every reason to answer for it.
Then enter the new media, where everyone is a self-made editor. All manners of stories are concocted as truthful, without the thought of who it might affect or directed at.
Those who write and publish them do so believing they are beyond sanction. How wrong can they be!
So long as one is previledged to own an Android phone, his or parlour becomes the newsroom for all manners of contrivances.
They may satisfy their understanding, but those who have been ‘harassed’ or falsely accused; would always need to clear the Augean Stables, in order to set the records right.
Not everyone would swallow it, hook line and sinker. Some have let it lie low; believing ‘the sins of the accusers may expose them one day’.
For this and many others, new media platforms are daily inundated with barrage of innuendos on persons; about who they are and what they know about them in the past and or presently.
These are characteristic, but, nonetheless, they are disingenious the way such are peddled for consumption.
Young men and women who make spurious allegations on public officials do so without gumption. They think it is a right to engage in it.
They are often filled with a sense of accomplishment; but even more, they think that defaming or maligning a victim is taming his rise to prominence.
They forget their victims have a say too. Once it is posted, they go to sleep, so long as no one raises eyebrows. The damage would have been done.
They hardly know that they have reduced their victims in the estimation of men and women of goodwill.
When it happens, those who are not party to it mostly are wont to defend who they like or are close to, but not what is right any more.
Like many, who have spoken for and against it; I shall not be quick to judge, it is imperative to however caution that the new development is assuming a dangerous precedence.
Whether such posts are ‘casual’ or ‘unconscionable’, the preponderance of the phenomenon have become worrisome; even as some have been used by the powerful to think that it is the way to settle scores.
Whether we like it or not, the development often gets to the point that most of those who allege are not able to withstand the heat.
It is possible to turn the heat around for good before it gets out of hand. Matthew 5:25 states in clear terms what to do when anyone finds himself in this situation.
We have reached the point where those who engage in the practice have to ask themselves what they stand to benefit from it.
Streetbell Online 