There is a quiet corruption that corrodes election coverage in Cameroon long before a single ballot is cast. It is not vote buying. It is not ballot stuffing. It is the journalist who has ceased to be a journalist and become an informant.

In theory, the press exists as the Fourth Estate — an independent institution that holds power to account. In practice, during elections, a segment of the press has inverted that function. It no longer reports on power. It reports to power. It no longer informs the public. It informs politicians about the public, and worse, about other journalists.

This is not a lapse in ethics. It is a structural betrayal of the profession.

The classical social contract of journalism is unambiguous: the journalist’s primary allegiance is to the citizen, not to the state, not to the party, and not to the source.

The press card is not a licence granted by MINCOM. It is a public trust. When a journalist receives information about electoral malpractice:
intimidation in Bamenda, irregular voter registration in Douala, the bribing of voters in Kumba— and his first instinct is to alert the implicated politician rather than to verify and publish, he has broken that contract.

He has redefined his role from watchdog to gatekeeper for the powerful. He has, in effect, privatised public information for political patronage.

Perhaps the most corrosive manifestation of this phenomenon is the rise of journalism about journalists, rather than journalism about facts.

Instead of competing on the basis of accuracy, depth, and verification, some practitioners now compete on the basis of denunciation. A colleague is not countered with evidence; he is reported to a politician actor and  discredited in private circles as an “opposant”, an “Amba” journalist , or a mercenary.

This is not press freedom. This is the weaponisation of the press. It reduces the media landscape to a theatre of proxy warfare, in which political actors use journalists as instruments to neutralise other journalists. The result is not a better-informed electorate, but a more polarised and more fearful one.

Access is essential to journalism. Proximity to power, however, is not the same as accountability to power.

As journalists, we need sources, not masters.
A source provides information. A master gives instructions. 
The distinction collapses when a journalist can no longer publish a verified fact because it would embarrass a political ally, or when he kills a story on the instruction of a campaign strategist.

The test of independence is not whether a journalist has contacts in high places. It is whether he can sit with a mayor in the morning and publish a critical, evidence-based report about that same mayor in the evening. If access requires silence, then it is not access. It is capture.

Politicians are “mobile”, administrations change, parties fracture, and patrons forget their clients but your publication stays.

The journalist who acted as an informant during an election will discover, after the polls close, that his protection has expired. The elected official will no longer take his calls. The party will deny the relationship. But the archive will remain — the stories he suppressed, the colleagues he betrayed, the narratives he laundered for power.

History is unkind to the press that served power. It is generous only to the press that served truth, often at great personal cost.

A journalist must:
NOT be an informant
NOT be a courier of newsroom intelligence to campaign headquarters
NOT be a prosecutor of his colleagues on behalf of politicians.

His function especially during elections, is inform the masses.
This requires independence, rigour, and the courage to be unpopular with those running for office.