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.