Why writer needs more lessons on media

I wish to reply to an article by Adhere Calvince which was published in this paper on February 4, 2015.

Frankly, although Calvince was one of my best journalism students, but the more I read his piece (a reply to an earlier article penned in The Nairobian), the more I get convinced that he promptly needs to come back to class for graduate studies.

In the paper, he highlights three key issues on the media environment in Kenya that need to be fleshed out and further interrogated.

First, Calvince is right to argue that the social media has vastly disrupted the media scene. In actual fact, if the definition of who and what constitutes journalism as a profession was difficult to nail in the past, the situation is even more difficult today.

Any individual with a smart phone is a potential journalist. Any rabble-rouser out there, with a Twitter following of tens of thousands is a microcosm of a fully functional media house able to set agenda as does any media outfit.

While I do agree that the attributes that make any vocation a profession are present in journalism, we must with humility accept that the profession is in danger of dying. Or is it simply evolving? In the west, jobs for journalists are rapidly shrinking.

Since we have so many other fast, online, mobile methods of delivering news, it is difficult to see how someone will get paid in future to deliver that news. The field itself is growing and evolving more than journalists are able to accept and adapt to the change.

There are now more opportunities for sharing content than anyone can imagine and the troubling thing is that anyone can share news. So why pay someone to do it? I hold the view that the field is evolving rather than dying but feel few journalists are alive to the grim reality that their world has been fundamentally disrupted by the social media.

That is why my good student Calvince should be more humble rather than dismiss this phenomenon as comprising of a 'hodgepodge of amateurs who believe that having a social media account and a newsroom email address is all one needs to be a journalist.' Truth is they cannot be ignored.

The second issue Calvince laments about is the surplus of sleaze and obscenities coming off our FM radio stations. On this point I agree. But as much as I agree with him, there are some painful realities that we must accept as Kenyans.

First, no one ever held a gun at someone's head to listen to a particular station or read a particular webpage or news report.

There is always the element of choice enabled through consumer agency: the dial button on radio or the remote control on TV. The choice of what to read and what not to read are all within the reader's discretion, it is never coerced.

 

Second, just as a people deserve their leaders however myopic or infantile their manners are, a people too deserve their media. Our media reflects our sensibilities and our identities.

Our media is truly us, a mirror of ourselves, our values, fears and aspirations. That is the truth.

Finally, Calvince argues that the mere fact that Hillary Ngweno's opinion was sought on the suitability of one Mwai Kibaki becoming Moi's vice president is tantamount to media complicity.

According to him, such rendezvous undermine highly regarded journalistic tenets of objectivity and distance. I disagree. First, journalists are human beings and live on earth, not space.

Their opinion, just like that of the cobbler, the florist, or the dentist can be sought by anyone who believes they possess competence in their area of expertise.

Calvince cannot expect journalists to drop calls or deliberately avoid invitations simply because it will compromise journalistic objectivity.

More important, the relationship between wielders of power and journalists is one of symbiotic sense