♦Mohamed KHARTOUF
In a world that defends freedom of expression and celebrates notable personalities in the media landscape, there is a whole category of shadow journalists, or “ghost journalists”.
These “ghosts” write articles, investigate subjects, formulate visions and supply entire platforms with ideas and words, without having the right to sign their writings. These are the silent media workers, hidden behind pseudonyms or behind the facades of institutions who buy their ideas like commodities, without receiving attention or recognition for their words. It is not always about fear of censorship or a personal desire to hide, as some imagine.
This forced disappearance is often the result of unfair employment contracts, commercial agreements that do not respect the ethical values of the profession, or even deeply rooted norms within certain institutions that consider journalists as simple tools of production or “chickens in a cocoon”, without the need to honor them or grant them space for recognition.
In Morocco, as in other Arab countries, this type of « unsigned production » is widespread on many news sites, and even in the pages of some printed newspapers which entrust opinion articles to the « editorial » or « editorial », even if their texts often bear the style of a particular author.
In this silent system, the journalist is deprived of one of the most important pillars of his identity: his name. He loses the vital link that binds him to his audience, is excluded from any possibility of professional accumulation and symbolic recognition, and is sometimes forced to remain silent about the theft or unauthorized recycling of his ideas.
We cannot talk about responsible, critical and innovative journalism without recognizing the devastating impact of this systematic marginalization that hits many young journalistic minds, leading them to erode internally, lose their passion and gradually transform into writing machines without horizon or spirit.
The most dangerous aspect of the absence of signature is not only professional injustice, but also the breakdown of the relationship with responsibility. When a text is not linked to its author, responsibility fades, honesty becomes confused with direction, and truth with propaganda.
Lines become blurred and authorless discourse spreads, weakening the credibility of media content as a whole. This perhaps explains the slow erosion of Arab public trust in the media; when readers do not know who is writing, they no longer trust what they read.
Beyond utopianism, this is not a question of journalists refusing to appear out of modesty or security. Rather, it is an undeclared policy that excludes authors from their image and monopolizes their voices for the benefit of institutions, individuals or entities who do not want anyone to stand out from their molds or “their molds in Moroccan terms”.
This policy not only harms journalists, but also drains the media of their vitality, transforming them into a simple technical facade intended to reproduce the dominant discourse.
True journalism relies solely on the presence of the individual, with their voice, their background, their signature, their fears, if applicable, and their courage if necessary.
Preventing a journalist from signing his article amounts to condemning him to professional isolation and depriving him of the right to build its identity and contribute to public awareness. However, the time has come to boldly ask this question: who writes? Who signs? Who is excluded?
When will we regain the recognition of those who have always been there, writing what we read, but whose faces and names we ignore?
