Be very very afraid when you see the media and the governing authorities speak in the same voice.
The media is the Fourth Estate, after parliament, executive and the judiciary, and is meant to be part of the check and balances in any society. Media, as I learned in my journalism classes, is meant to inform, educate and entertain. I never heard anywhere that the media was supposed to keep the peace and maintain law and order, or govern.
On the other hand, this does not mean to say that the media should be a rabble-rouser.
Kenya has just come from a very gruesome electoral process that culminated in the naming of Uhuru Kenyatta of Jubilee as the president-elect of Kenya. Raila Odinga of CORD has gone to the Supreme Court to contest the decision by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission to announce Uhuru the winner.
During the vote tallying process that took close to a week, the media went on self-censorship mode, refusing to air concerns of some of the political players. I agree with British editor and columnist Simon Jenkins when he says that, “”The media is in the business of selling stories, not running the country”.
Looking at those events, I am concerned as a media practitioner. I think the Kenyan media ought to be very careful, lest it is used by politicians and government functionaries to play their role of governance, at the detriment of their primary role of keeping society in the know, and keeping the other arms of the government on check.
It has been reported that Kenfrey Kiberenge of the Daily Nation told the Associated Press that “editors are not allowing inflammatory statements to get into the newspapers”. Kiprono Kittony, the chairman of the Media Owners Association, told AP that he thinks the media has done a “fantastic job” of keeping the public informed without compromising peace and security.
The question I am asking myself is, how will the media now report some of the very issues that they did not want to touch during the election tallying process, now that some of those issues will arise in the case that has gone to the Supreme Court? Has anything changed? Will writing about the issues not cause the same feelings and outcomes that they feared?
Another question that needs to be answered is, how does the media judge whether a statement is inflammatory or not?
The media is trying to play a role that it is not supposed to play. In the name of trying to be seen to be neutral, the media is actually taking sides. My question is this, if there were glaring anomalies in the tallying process, what would have been the role of the media? Would it have been to bring to the fore the issues, or to let them pass just for the sake of peace? Doing that of course has its own consequences.
By failing to report on issues as they occur, the media is more concerned with the political outcomes of the issues while failing in its duty of being a media that questions and holds accountable those in positions of authority.
Up to this point in time, the media has not questioned why equipment that was bought at exorbitant price, with money that was borrowed, and which will be paid for dearly by taxpayers, and which was supposed to help in assuring the integrity of the elections, failed. It is only today that the Daily Nation has raised queries about the failure of the electronic tallying system. Too little too late.
Going back to my earlier argument, if the Supreme Court was to find that indeed there were anomalies as claimed by the CORD team, would the media not be ashamed for failing to highlight the issue when it was pointed out by one of the protagonists in the elections in the first instance? Every media house always strives to be first out with the news. I wonder why this was not the case during the tallying process.
My contention is that as much as the media would try to keep the peace, it should not abdicate its primary role of informing, educating and entertaining its audiences. Let the peace-keepers and others whose role it is to preach and maintain peace do so, while the media does what it is called to do.
The fact that the media is sacrificing its mandate to inform for the sake of peace is an indictment of the Kenyan people. The Kenyan media is basically saying that Kenyans are incapable of making rational decisions. It means that they can be easily influenced by statements from politicians. It also means that we are not yet politically mature as much as we may try to pretend and say that our democracy has matured.
The media has become so terrified that it cannot do its work. This is not right because what will happen when we have a despot as a leader. Will the media keep silent so as not to disturb the peace?
What would have happened if the media kept quiet in the 80s and 90s, when there was political repression in the country, so as not to rub the wrong way the leadership of the country at that time?
Peace may have won for now but the media has lost in its role to be a watchdog of society. The media is on the cross here.
Finally, I wish to reiterate the words of US President Barack Obama the other day: “A press that questions, that holds us accountable, that sometimes gets under our skins-is absolutely an essential part of our democracy”.
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