Legacy media held captive by commercial interests, advertisers treated as gods while public interest suffers

 

I have struggled with the impact and consequences of getting this article published, and at some point, I made up my mind that I would just shelve it for fear of rousing a dragon I may not manage to deal with. I have made numerous edits in a hopeless attempt to defang it.

But then I watched Steven Spielberg’s The Post, the movie about Pentagon Papers and Ben Bradlee’s line (played by Hanks), “The only way to protect the right to publish is to publish,” gave me the confidence to go ahead and submit it.

TO BE A JOURNALIST OR NOT

I made up my mind that I was going to be a journalist when I was 11 years old. It was in Kano Plains, in a small village called Ong’eche, on a rainy evening in a leaking grass thatched house.

My last-born sister had a horrible fever so she was crying helplessly and the leaking roof only driven a hot nail into a festering wound.

Overcome with sympathy, I chucked the one shilling in my pocket and I gave it to my mum to buy a painkiller for her hoping that it would subdue whatever pain she was feeling.

Seeing the pain in our family and imagining what other people in the region were going through, I promised my mother that one day I would like to be journalist and cover the floods of Kano just to show the world the pain our people went through with the hope of ending their misery.

In my young mind, I knew that being a journalist was a powerful tool that could put an end to the misery I saw in my village.

People suffering from water-borne diseases, students swimming to school while balancing books on their heads, displaced families relying on donations to survive, ruined crops and pure pain and many other things made it clear that I had no option but to do something when I grew up.

The pen in my mind was mightier than the floods.

Almost 20 years later, my dream was fulfilled. I joined the Fourth Estate with the zeal of 100 salesmen. I was passionate and driven to dig up, write stories that are close to my heart - governance and human rights.

For a while, I did it with the dedication and drive of Mongolia wrestlers.

While enjoying the ride, I started to notice structural challenges that limited the power of reporters to really tell public interest stories.

As an eternal optimist, I knew that I would one day contribute to eliminating some of these challenges that stood on the way of a great transformative story.

Weeks later, the zeal was quenched and the drive punctured like a flat tyre with my passion coming to a screeching halt.

 SHOCK ON ME

I realised just how personal interests had crippled an otherwise powerful platform that for a sum of money, depending on the ‘juiciness’ of the story and the profiles involved, some would rather look away than tell the story of a poor woman knocked down by a ‘powerful’ pastor’s vehicle on a famous highway.

The legacy media, I realised were held captive by commercial interests that a few giant advertisers are treated as gods as the public interest suffers.

Stories from select politicians, parties, counties were amplified and given oomph than from another section of the political divide.

Headlines were twisted, specific stories given prominence while others completely killed even though they deserved to be told. I later got to understand the power of who owns the media. I realised how organisations would rather fund a management retreat than invest a proper budget in story-telling and paying reporters well.

Tools of trade of scribes are not given priority while a select few swim in opulence. I began to question some of these things.

I voiced my frustrations to fellow scribes.

That is when I realised that a small clique of members of the Fourth Estate benefit from the current dysfunction in the legacy media.

Instead of telling the truth, they have turned into powerful cartels, using their positions of authority to amass wealth in the form of kickbacks while the truth suffers.

If you were to do a lifestyle audit, you would realise that the miracles of Jesus multiplying food still do exist in their lives albeit in a darkroom covered with brown envelopes.

And there lies the problem with Kenya’s legacy media: We have more gatekeepers than change makers.

Biased narratives are driven while the unsuspecting common mwananchi drinks it as holy water.

In a country where most schools do not train on critical thinking, many minds are conditioned to believe whatever legacy media says and thus, many people are misinformed.

While this article may sound entirely biased against the legacy media in Kenya, a few people still stand strong.

But those who do are few in positions of authority.

We need to empower alternative voices to offer accountability.

Bloggers can invest more in their craft so that they can be the alternative voices.

We have to deconstruct the legacy media as currently constituted with a few giants controlling huge chunks of the market by investing in more public interest ventures. The civil society can come together to form a pro people media that will work to keep government in check.

And as citizens we can stand with journalists who risk their lives to tell the truth.

If we do not, our democracy will stagnate or worse, slip back into an autocracy if at all we are not there yet.

We have to support men and women who are willing to put the interest of the common mwananchi back to the heart of the story.

My worry is that with the media’s agenda-setting power, if we do not free it from selfish interests that hold the media hostage, we may soon find ourselves with a lap dog of a Fourth Estate that cannot bite.