When news prevents crisis: Understanding the pre-emptive power of journalism

THOMAS NKHOMA | Tuesday December 9, 2025 08:02

There is a particular kind of silence that only journalists recognise, a silence that follows a story that worked. Not the triumphant silence after exposing a scandal, but the quiet absence of a disaster that almost happened. It is the silence of a crisis averted because sunlight reached the problem early enough to change the final outcome. This is the pre-emptive function of journalism, a role easily misunderstood but essential to any functioning democracy.

It is a counterintuitive reality. When the press exposes a potentially destabilising issue - say, threats of mass resignations, questionable deals or looming institutional breakdowns - and those threats later dissipate, critics shout: “You see? The media lied!” Yet sometimes nothing catastrophic happened precisely because the media reported it early.

What is often overlooked is that the media does not operate in a vacuum.

Journalists do not manufacture news out of thin air. They report what they learn from the very society they serve: insiders, whistleblowers, concerned citizens and public officials who pass information because they fear that silence might lead to something worse.

Botswana experienced this misunderstanding recently. When reports emerged that some senior government officials either contemplated leaving the service or were to be dropped under the new administration, anxiety rippled through the public service. It was a transitional moment, the kind where uncertainty can unsettle institutions. Yet when no departures ultimately happened, a loud chorus arose accusing the media of “lying” and “misleading the public.”

However, stability prevailed not because the initial concerns were fabricated. It may have prevailed because the matter entered the public domain. Once exposed, political principals recalculated, those contemplating departure reflected on the national consequences and the system corrected itself. Journalism did what it often does best: prevented the crisis from fully forming. Unfortunately, this reality is becoming increasingly difficult for the public to accept. To that end, President Duma Boko’s persistent claims that Botswana’s media “lies 90% of the time,” that it manufactures falsehoods and peddles untruths, have created fertile ground for suspicion.

With each broad-brush accusation, many Batswana have become conditioned to dismissing stories that do not culminate in drama as evidence of journalistic deceit, never considering that the very act of reporting may have stopped the drama from unfolding.

Since the President repeated these claims in Parliament, social media has become an arena of relentless attacks on journalists, with commentators treating every unmaterialised risk as proof that the press is unreliable.

Some now even argue that Botswana should retain criminal defamation laws specifically to “control journalists.” Yet these punitive laws do not target journalists. They target every citizen because in the digital era, every person with a smartphone has the ability to publish, share and amplify information.

To preserve such laws under the guise of punishing “lying journalists” is to endanger free expression for the entire nation.

This is happening at a time when the world is battling an information crisis. Misinformation, disinformation and malinformation have eroded trust globally, contributing to what scholars call the collapse of the information ecosystem. Other countries, recognising the scale of the threat, are strengthening truth infrastructures through coordinated safeguards between academia, media, civil society and the state.

These are national projects, not media luxuries. Botswana, by contrast, risks drifting in the opposite direction. Instead of fortifying our truth ecosystem, we have entered a season where leaders attack the media for doing its job, even as citizens wade through polluted digital waters with little support.

The danger of this climate is that it blinds citizens to the pre-emptive function of news, a role understood globally but still underappreciated here. The United States offers a well-known case study. Before the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, journalists had enough information to challenge or expose the CIA’s poorly conceived plan.

They chose silence, believing they were “protecting national interests.” When the invasion failed, resulting in avoidable loss of life, President John F. Kennedy lamented that the press had not sounded the alarm. Had journalists fulfilled their pre-emptive duty, he admitted, the calamity might have been averted.

South Africa provides yet another illustration. In the mid-2000s, the Mail & Guardian and Sunday Times exposed early signs of interference and mismanagement in state enterprises. Many of the feared collapses did not materialise, not because the warnings were false but because exposure forced government action.

The press was criticised for “alarmism,” yet its early warnings prevented deeper institutional decay. Botswana, too, has a history of stories that forced corrective steps long before a crisis matured. Procurement irregularities have been halted mid-course because newspapers raised questions. Tenders have been rescinded. Policies have been reconsidered. Sometimes the very act of asking uncomfortable questions forces accountability. Conversely, when nothing dramatic happens, critics rush to declare that “the media lied.” What we have witnessed lately is broad, unmeasured attacks that paint journalism as inherently deceitful and frame early warnings as malicious inventions.

News is not meant to sit back and watch a disaster unfold just to prove a point. It is not prophecy. It is oversight. The press functions like a smoke detector.

When it triggers early and a fire is extinguished before it spreads, no reasonable person would argue that “because the house did not burn down, the alarm was lying.” Only those who misunderstand its purpose would say so.

Consequently, in a democracy, the pre-emptive role of journalism maintains the integrity of systems before they fracture. It deters wrongdoing, restrains reckless decisions and forces transparency.

When audiences lose this understanding - when they are conditioned to see journalists as habitual liars - society becomes vulnerable to the very crises a free press is designed to prevent.

Botswana cannot afford such vulnerability. Our institutions, like any others, require scrutiny, sunlight and timely warnings.

Dismissing this essential democratic function will not only weaken the press. It will weaken the nation. Sometimes the best journalism is the kind that leaves no headline behind, only a country that remained steady while no one was looking. And in that silent steadiness, democracy breathes.

*Thomas Thos Nkhoma is MISA-Botswana chairperson