Today is World Press Freedom Day (WFPD) a day to celebrate freedom of the press. Freedom of the press embodies freedom of speech and freedom of expression. It is from this freedom that other freedoms emanate, including the freedom of choice.

Freedom of the press is not for the media workers. It should never be. Because, then, it would be subject to abuse. If freedom of the press were for practitioners, it would be just an echo, a tinkling cymbal.

Freedom of the press should mean amplifying the voice of the voiceless. A free press should entail raising the volume for the muted voices. It is these oppressed voices that the free press should serve.

Which is why I woke up with this funny feeling. This morning, I have been grabbed by a spirit where neither good nor bad news were in the free press.

As I lay, I saw the masses not aware that President Lazarus Chakwera was sharing a table with some of the most critical journalists against his regime. Then, I realised that that is not what the masses may have missed most. What they must have not known is that most of the journalists had to battle it out, literally, with petrol attendants to get a litre of fuel to get them to the breakfast table.

Indeed, the masses in their ignorance about the fuel crisis, they could have remembered that once the press reported in January that the Petroleum Importers Limited and the National Oil Company of Malawi agreed that the country would suffer no long queues in 2023. We would only live in the past.

On this day, in the absence of a free press, and in the absence of news, the speculation just rolled in my head that the fuel shortage could only come because of lack of forex. How can an agro-based economy lack forex when the tobacco marketing season is on? Which tobacco? With no media to explain the real cause for the fuel shortage, the explanations came in wild, including the fact that some entourage was on the way to Buckingham Palace or the Windsor Castle to celebrate neo-colonialism.

Without a free press, on this day without the media, unverified speculation ruled the mind.

So, I came out of that world with no news media to a world of social media. Here was a strongly free world where attacks on individuals, disregard to the rights of the Malawian child, the improper aggregation against everyone was rife. Much as social media has simplified so much of the mainstream media practitioner’s work, it has posed a threat to democratic values. But then, who will guard the guards?

The post A day without news first appeared on The Nation Online.