News Commercialisation, Objective Journalism Practice and the Sustenance of Democracy in Nigeria
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent journalism practice, news is increasingly becoming a commodity valued for its role in informing or persuading the public on political, social, cultural and economic issues. Thus, in modern journalism practice, news is commercialised to the extent that only the rich get their ideas communicated to the members of the public. This in turn, affects objective journalism practice, both in the print and electronic media, thereby, negatively impacting on democracy. The survival of democracy depends on the flow of information to the people. Objective journalism practice is needed in democracy. The journalist decides which information will go forward and which will not. Important to realise is that journalists are able to control the public’s knowledge of the actual events by letting some stories pass through the system, while keeping others out. The paper, therefore, evaluates the impact of news commercialisation on objective journalism practice and how it in turn, affects the sustenance of democracy. That is, whether it has negative or positive impact on democracy in Nigeria. The paper examines the rationale behind news commercialisation vis-a-vis its dangers and implications on the sustenance of Nigeria’s democracy; it is anchored on gate keeping theory and the social responsibility theory. In addition, the paper proffers solutions on how to better practise journalism that will earn the goodwill and confidence of the people and contributing positively to democracy, not only in Nigeria, but the entire Africa. Key words: Journalism; Ethics; News Commercialisation; Objectivity; Democracy and Development
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".