Opinion
By Valentine Obienyem
EVEN non-professionals know that news is an exaggeration of the exceptional. It is something that hardly ever happens. So, we are told, if a dog bites a man, it is no news; but if a man bites a dog, it becomes news – and a sensational one at that.
In our society today, people look for the exceptional to report on a second-by-second basis, especially now that the craving for traffic is becoming a form of madness. If there is no exceptional news, such as a flying bird falling down and turning into a human, one must be invented at all costs.
The newest in the series of exceptional news being circulated concerns a priest of the Nsukka Diocese who made his parishioner pregnant. The priest has only been ordained for three years, making it very probable that he started sleeping with the woman as a seminarian.
I have seen every blogger reporting the news according to their selective fancies. Even this morning, I listened to Nwanyi Orumba on the same news, which is the immediate provocation for this piece.
NOW, THERE HAVE BEEN VERY POWERFUL REBUTTALS OF THIS NEWS. IN FACT, THE PERSON WHO ORIGINALLY REPORTED IT HAS COME OUT TO APOLOGISE, STATING THAT IT WAS FAKE AND CONTAINED NO IOTA OF TRUTH. DOES IT MEAN THAT ALL THESE PEOPLE STILL REPORTING IT HAVE NOT COME ACROSS THE REBUTTALS? THIS IS WHERE THE PROBLEM LIES.
Because a priest making a woman pregnant is dramatic enough and will pull traffic, nobody wants to deal with the rebuttal. This is where we must talk about the ethics of the profession. Is it still okay to be reporting false news, knowing it to be false, while pretending not to have seen the rebuttal? This is the crux of the matter.
Coupled with the harbingers of the “back-to-root” movement, we can notice a gruelling anti-clericalism among our people. They will readily tell you, if you care to listen, that priests do things which an “Omenani” priest would never do.
We hear too much – we ourselves speak too much – of the few priests who gain entrance into history by breaking their celibate vows like the falsely accused priest; we do not care to hear of those multitudes who cannot be made unchaste by any force. These critics, like most of us, are guilty of this “selectivism”. To make clear their scorn for celibacy, they choose and quote books that are against celibacy. But we know now, more by hindsight, that nowhere are the prejudices of a critic likely to mislead him as when he seeks to determine the moral level of an institution, practice he does not like, or group of people he scorns.
In this case, the dramatic exception, and what he thinks will interest his readers, will strike his eye. His vision will be further blurred if he approaches the problem with a thesis to prove – for example, that celibacy should be abolished or that priests have girl friends. And the records are ambivalent, capable, according to selective bias, of proving almost anything. This is the celibacy critic in action; but this is one of the worst methods of appraising any issue to the benefit of the uninformed.
It is in this same climate of reckless selectivity that one recalls how the lunatic fringe circulated a deliberately misleading image of Fr. Kelvin Ugwu with his mother, falsely captioning it as that of a father and his supposed girlfriend. A simple, verifiable context was stripped away and replaced with manufactured scandal, all in service of the same appetite for outrage and traffic or mischief.
Ultimately, the persistent peddling of this Nsukka Diocese story, long after its own purveyor confessed it to be a fabrication, exposes a deeper moral crisis in our media space. When the mad rush for online traffic overrides verified truth, journalism loses its soul, and the public is left fed on manufactured scandals. We must learn to look past the wicked agenda of these selective critics and the “back to root” movement, who exploit singular falsehoods or manufacture many to wage war against entire institutions. An institution cannot be justly defined by sensational lies or dramatic exceptions, but by the silent, faithful majority whose commitment remains unbroken.
A.I
May 28, 2026
Tags: Valentine Obienyem