The appointment of Dr Bright Mhango — better known by his social media persona, Morton Baghaya — to a broadcasting role at Times Television and Radio might, on its surface, read as a curious piece of casting.
“We call it code switching”: Baghaya explains new professional persona for TV
Baghaya has built his public profile on precisely the register that mainstream current affairs journalism traditionally avoids: loose, informal, often provocative commentary designed for maximum traction online.
That he is now stepping into programmes vacated by the death of respected journalist Brian Banda — Times Exclusive, Hot Current and Kwagwanji — invites an obvious question: can the two modes coexist in the same person?
Mhango’s own answer is more considered than his online persona might suggest. He describes the shift not as a departure from who he is, but as a deliberate act of code-switching.
“On social media, you have to be loose with language. Otherwise, you cannot have traction. But in corporate affairs, you need proper language,” he explained — a framing that treats his social media voice not as an authentic default but as one register among several, each suited to a different kind of audience and a different kind of institutional trust.
That distinction matters, because it reveals something about how public commentary functions in Malawi’s current media environment.
Social media has become, for figures like Mhango, a space where reach depends on provocation; broadcast journalism, by contrast, still trades on a different currency — credibility, institutional backing, and the expectation of measured analysis.
Mhango’s insistence that his television work will be “issue-based,” rather than aimed at generating laughs or singling out individuals for ridicule, suggests an awareness of exactly what separates the two spaces, and a conscious effort not to import one into the other.
There is, too, an implicit continuity worth noting. Mhango’s journalistic roots run back to Nyasa Times and The Nation, institutions of conventional reporting long before his social media following took shape.
His current pivot might be read less as reinvention than as a return — albeit one now amplified by a public profile his earlier newspaper career never afforded him.
Perhaps the most substantive part of his stated approach lies in his appeal to the public for tips and information, and his framing of journalism’s dependence on ordinary citizens willing to surface what he calls “hidden issues.”
It is a reminder that whatever tone current affairs broadcasting adopts, its actual substance still rests on the same foundation it always has: a public willing to talk, and journalists willing to follow where that leads without, as Mhango puts it, turning the result into an exercise in pointing fingers.
Whether Baghaya’s transition succeeds will likely depend less on his rhetorical dexterity than on whether Malawian audiences accustomed to his social media voice extend the same trust to his more restrained broadcast persona — and whether that restraint, in turn, proves durable once the cameras are rolling and the temptation to entertain reasserts itself.
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