Some radio presenters carry adolescent personality

By Charles Kanjama

When I was in my final year of High School, our principal gave us a public lecture. We were rebellious boys, tormented by raging hormones and adolescent attitude. He drew on the blackboard stick-diagrams of a boy and a girl. Each with a head, trunk, arms and legs.

He drew a heart on each trunk and pointed three arrows at the drawings, one each at the head, the heart and the base of the trunk. Then he advised us, "There is a proper hierarchy in the human body: the head on top, which must rule the heart, and the gonads below. Some of you behave as if you have your head in your gonads, and your gonads in your head..."

Kenyan radio stations generally do a great job. But some stations have been publicly struggling through the adolescent crisis. The giggles of their radio presenters carry an adolescent, not adult, personality laced with talk from the gutter. They are unable to rise above the belt in discussing human affairs. They gleefully impose upon the public, especially the captive audiences commuting daily in public transport, their obsession with sex and infidelity.

Of course, a respectful discussion of sexuality and relationships at the right time and place can contribute to the health of society. Some societal taboos should even be exposed by the sober lights of reason and faith to reflect changing culture. Both prudishness and hypocrisy should be challenged.

Philosopher John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859) proposed some public decency in society for the sake of children. Mill objected to general censorship, preferring a free marketplace where decency and indecency compete.

In contrast, David Hart’s article Freedom and Decency (2004) argues that indecency harms us and has a compulsive nature. Hart explains, "Certainly there is nothing in the constitutional charter of free speech that obliges us to permit any product, no matter how depraved its content, to be created, sold, promulgated, procured or kept. More importantly, a society that refuses all censorship is in some crucial sense extremely unjust. [Without] some regime of civic prudence, society cannot assure its citizens any measure of genuinely civil freedom."

To advise the moral majority to just turn off the television, radio or Internet is myopic in today’s interconnected world. Why should we be digitally assaulted and have to insulate ourselves from public space in a vain attempt to avoid lewd, dissolute and perverted elements in society? The crass and indecent have no right to impose their bad taste on the rest. Mass media always involves a public trust.

In balancing freedom and decency, there will be dangers of excesses. What Alessandro Manzoni says about justice in the Italian classic, The Betrothed (1827), applies here: "Right and wrong are seldom divided by so precise a line that either side can have a monopoly of one of them." Still, Kenya’s current problem is a growing excess of public indecency.

We should support efforts by regulatory agencies to penalise egregious instances of indecency in broadcasting and print media. The poorly-worded articles 33 and 34 of our new Constitution will make this more difficult. Still, proper legal interpretation will permit public regulation of decency within reasonable limits. Even in the US, with similar legal protection of free speech, the Federal Communications Commission has power to penalise indecency that panders to the prurient interest.

Kenyans need courage to confront indecency in mass media. G K Chesterton’s remark in What’s wrong with the world (1910) holds true: "There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one’s grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers."

With personal choices also, we can resist the new tyranny of talk radio turned into trash radio and mainstream press breeding gutter press. If not, the country will gradually regress into an adolescent nation with heads in the gonads and gonads in the head.

—The author is an advocate of the High Court