Pictures might not tell lies but pictures, like all images, do not come with their meaning. It is still the viewer who develops his or her own understanding of any picture and gives the picture a meaning.
The name synonymous with the Daily Times as it was then
This picture came to Intervention with an incomplete top and the lower part. Even then, it still tells many stories. Or, it can be ‘read’ differently.
One view could be how global or cosmopolitan the media ownership and control in Daily Times. As the picture did not come with the date it was taken, it is impossible to say immediately when this had been achieved but it is still a point to make, considering the years of its unchallenged height in Nigerian journalism and politics. There were no other newspapers like it before the late 1940s.
An alternative reading of the picture could be how far the newspaper business had gone in running the Daily Times. Board members were properly constituted, procedure wise, going by the caption of the pictures. It was not what obtains today in terms of management structures of most of the newspapers.
Kudos to about the only surviving early risers
A third way of reading it is how early persons of Yoruba identity took control of the Nigerian press, going by the Yoruba cultural identity of the faces.
Someone with the religious gaze could say the Daily Times was totally controlled by the Christians although its patriarch, Babatunde Jose, was a Muslim.
Whichever interpretation catches the fancy of each reader of the image, it raises the question of how heights attained decades ago could neither be surpassed nor sustained by supposedly more educated, more global, more technology suave generation!
