The Sanctimonious Circus of Arise TV

Every morning, Arise TV’s Morning Show presents itself as a current affairs program, but don’t be fooled – it is, in practice, a tribunal disguised as television. Its hosts, a self-anointed panel of moral magistrates, wield their microphones like judicial gavels, operating under the quaint delusion that they alone guard the gates of Nigerian democracy. To appear before them is not to be interviewed but to be arraigned, with all the charm of a customs inspection and the warmth of an FIRS audit.

Their technique – if one can dignify it with such a term – seems to owe more to the methods of a traffic cop than a trained journalist. They approach their guests as if armed with the notes from a 1950s customary court manual, each question a blunt instrument swung with the subtlety of a machete.

But blame them not because they did not spend their formative years in journalism schools, but in Theater Arts, Animal Science, etc. Since man is said in some quarters to be an animal, the animal scientist figures he came equipped to keep man that way. More so, they appear to be familiar with the training method for highway policemen – they bark questions with the finesse of a sergeant drilling raw recruits. Of course every rule has an exception.

Consider their handling of the Natasha affair, in which they fawned over her with the unblinking devotion of children circling a Christmas pudding. One of them, with the breathless conviction of a Jambite philosophy student, proclaimed, “This is about seat, and Rosa Parks was about seat too.” It was the kind of false equivalence that makes a rational mind wince – a reminder that history, like fire, should only be handled by those who understand its dangers. Rosa Parks refused to stand up; Natasha refused to sit down. One defied a bus driver’s demand, the other swore an oath of compliance before flouting it. The difference is as stark as the gap between a protest and a tantrum. But do they care?

And then there is their chief provocateur, a man who has adopted the phrase “I put it to you” as his verbal prod. He slings it with the casual menace of a bailiff barking in a debtor’s prison. To Jesutega Onokpasa, he thundered, “I put it to you that you came here to misrepresent the facts,” as if he were reading the charges in a village court. I put it to him that “I put it to you” has no place to be put in a press interview. It belongs in police stations and courtrooms.

Their approach to biography is no less ham-fisted. In one memorable exchange, a host declared to a bewildered guest, “I don’t know what you do… I don’t know your background, whether it’s carpentry or something else.” So if you did not know before the interview, why didn’t you find out? Because they do not prepare for interviews in order not to risk the inconvenience of encountering facts that might complicate their preferred narratives.

In this high-stakes game of intellectual hubris, professionalism is but a forgotten relic, a dusty artifact left behind in journalism’s abandoned temples. For the hosts of Arise TV’s Morning Show, every guest is a suspect, every question an accusation, and every broadcast a small tribunal, convened without warning and adjourned without remorse. Except you are Natasha and they give you an “Evidence free” card and a pat on the back.