Media Foibles

I am totally incensed by the endless to-and-fro harangue between Kenya’s mainstream press and our politicians. It is a no-holds-barred and, by all measures, quite infantile campaign of misinformation, mudslinging and denigration. There is no question that both camps are the most loudmouthed in society but when they take to it in the fashion they have adopted over the last fortnight, a whole nation is the worse for it.
My rant is not so much about politicians as it is about the media.

We all know our politicos are no more than a bunch of self-righteous buffoons. After all, the media never tire of telling us this. But when the media pretends to be this hounded Goliath at the end of a tether pegged to the ground by this puny self righteous wannabe David, I am not taken in.

We have all heard about how the media stands gagged by Poghisio, Michuki and Karua. And those irritating voice clips playing on Kiss100 ostensibly addressed to Kibaki who, am sure Carol Mutoko will concur, never will and never has tuned in to the station. What we haven’t heard is honest or objective debate about the contentious bill. The scribes are so much obsessed with this senseless foaming-in-the-mouth outpouring of vitriol that they have forgotten their primary and foremost duty: to give us the story. Not just give us the story, but to tell it objectively and from both sides of the argument. For there is always the other side. Always. It doesn’t matter if you are the victim. We have as much right to hear Poghisio as we have of hearing the head of media owners association.

It is the media’s duty to keep the society informed. It is not, as they would have us believe, a favour they dole out to society; we pay dearly for it. Sometimes we pay in cash and more often, in pure psychological torture. Kenyan journalists, with a precious few exceptions, are most amateurish. The ones in the print business have no clue about proper grammar and basic punctuation while the anchors on TV and radio have a pronunciation that makes my high school English language teacher turn in her grave every time they take to the mike. Don’t get me started on the clichés that I last used whilst wooing my first blubbery girlfriend in grade six or the stale internet jokes that have no bearing to the way we live in Kenya.

And pray, when you have a whole week to write a 300- word article, how does it end up full of typos and sentences that snake their way through 3 dozen words with no commas, hyphens, colons or semicolons? Even more exasperating: how does the editor okay the articles? And, this is what befuddles me the most, all this in the age of multi-language spellcheckers, online thesauri and broadband internet. But I guess a fake American accent and a penchant for outrageous behaviour is all that one needs to pass auditions in our media houses.

Who's Smarter Now?

Did anyone watch the last edition of Who's Smarter Now on KTN?(Thur 18-01-07). I don't know about you but if you ask me, there are lots of not-so-smart questions being put to participants in that show.

The clincher was yesterday when the question meant for the home audience was so unsmartly framed as to imply that the Kenyan Maasai community supported terrorism, and specifically the infamous 9/11 attack on USA. How else would you explain the question: WHICH KENYAN COMMUNITY CONTRIBUTED CATTLE TOWARDS THE 9/11 ATTACKS ON THE U.S?

The boy who so heroically rallied his community to set aside part of their precious herd to help Americans in their hour of need could rightly sue for defamation.

A participant has as well been previously asked to give the common name for the Carribean countries south of the USA. I thought West Indies would be a smart enough answer to a quite dumb question but the presenter triumphantly called out: Latin America! when the buzzer went off with the hapless victor still unable to answer.

I will confess that history is not my strongest point, but isn't this programme misleading us when they claim again and again that South Africa was the last country to gain Independence in Africa? I stand to be corrected but I had a notion that South Africa was indeed the last coloniser in Africa, ruling over Namibia as late as the eighties and that what they attained in 1990 was majority rule, an end to the apartheid policy. Since the country was not ruled by another state but only an elitist white minority, the events of 1990 cannot be described as independence for the state, maybe for the blacks. As I said, am no historian and I stand to be corrected on this point.

There are many more goofs committed by Kenyan journalists and I hope this site will be a forum where I can share more gems and start a debate on this issue. Journalists have a duty to inform and entertain us but when they sleep on their job, it is only right that someone points it out.