How media is failing Kenya

By Barrack Muluka

From Baragoi, to the International Criminal Court, to tribal based presidential campaigns, and to corruption, MRC and what have you, the Kenyan Media is failing the nation. We scratch at the surface of things. We present them only for entertainment value. When did we lose it? Do we really understand the underlying rot?

The Media is often referred to as the Fourth Estate. This is not just another fancy honorific. The title is pregnant with history and meaning. It is about the power of the Media. It was Irish statesman Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797) who famously remarked, of the parliamentary press, “. . . yonder, there sits the Fourth Estate, more important far than they all.”

The other three traditional estates of the British Parliament were the Lords Spiritual, the Lords Temporal and the Commons. Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900) drove Burke’s point home. He, indeed, suggested that the media was the only Estate left in his day. “It has eaten up the other three,” he wrote in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, “The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by journalism.”

That is my point, precisely. We are dominated by vacuous journalism in Kenya. Journalism has eaten up everything.

Worse still, it is now busy eating up itself. The political class has nothing to say and says it. The academic and spiritual classes have nothing to say. Unfortunately, they also say it, too. And journalism should sooner than later have nothing to say – for it is already saying a lot of nothing.

The political class sets the nothing agenda. The clergy and allied spiritual superiors pick up the nothing and say it in their own way. Finally comes the journalist, who amplifies and crowns the collective nothing. Society dithers for it all.

Traditionally, they sold to you a tripartite cliché about the role of the mass Media.

To inform, they said, to educate and to entertain. It would not be that bad, if we stayed even at this clichéd level. At the very minimum, we would dispense education and information of sorts. However, we have picked up the entertainment docket and gone wild with it.

The essence of the Media has accordingly been reduced to infotainment and edutainment. The best gist for this mill is the nothing that the political class tells us. You cannot help feeling violated and defiled by the political class and the Media alike. Take the on-again and off-again political alliances in the country.

What do they mean for the citizen? Does it matter that it is a group calling itself G7? What does some fallout in the G7 and their thawing up with Prime Minister Raila Odinga mean for Kenya? Does it count for anything that Deputy Prime Minister Mudavadi, who had an acrimonious separation with the PM, may again ride in the same bandwagon with the PM?

What is the dividend for the citizen in the various political formations? When politicians say that they are talking to the “like minded” do we ask what is in the “like mind”?

Are our politicians trying to build consensus on taxation laws, or on medicare, transport and communication, education or on what?

 Has Water and Irrigation minister Charity Ngilu been having some very sharp differences with Uhuru Kenyatta on pension for the aged? Are they now about to build consensus?

Is Kalonzo Musyoka’s difference with Raila founded upon different standpoints on education? Are on-going consultations between their lieutenants bridging the ideological gap on the future of military spending?

The Kenyan citizen is exceedingly violated and defiled. You are a statistic, a willing tribal statistic. For, even the cow is sold only when it is willing to be sold. Your tribal overlord in Kikuyu land, Luo land, Luhya, Akamba and Kalenjin county sees you only as useful statistical object. And you are his property. “My people,” he says.

He owns you, the same way he owns his old pair of shoes.

He can auction you to Raila, Kalonzo or Uhuru. He can give you for free to Mudavadi, or to anybody. He can throw you into the old pit latrine at the marketplace in Tseikuru. You are a pair of dirty old shoes, good enough for Mzee Shuba na Ndebe.

One would expect our Media to caution us against the politics of nothing. Is it because we have been at it for too long that we can no longer think straight? It started with the tug of war in the original Ford Party in 1991.

That was 21 years ago. Who was going to team up with Jaramogi Oginga Odinga (Luo) and who would go with Kenneth Matiba (Kikuyu)? Then Mwai Kibaki threw the spanner in the works, with his DP (another Kikuyu). The rest has been a game of raw tribal arithmetic. Luo versus Kikuyu, Kikuyu versus Kalenjin, Luhya this, Akamba that...Kisii...

The majority of the fellows in journalism today were in primary school when we began these politics of nothing. Have they grown up on vacuous infotainment and edutainment? You look at the mature, mellowed and seasoned broadcasters on CNN, BBC World, Sky news, Al Jazeera and the like.

You see them get to the depth and substance of things. You wonder whether it is not Media owners who have fixed us? Where is national institutional memory in our journalism? Where is the international news footage on local TV?

The true role of the Media is to inform, editorialise and set agenda. Which one of our media houses is setting agenda for our country? The only healthy feeling in Kenya is to feel violated and defiled.

Having eaten up everybody else, can our mass media stop eating themselves up, too, and give us back our country? Can they begin giving us quality information that will change our lives for the better? Can they begin writing editorials that will prick the conscience of the nation? Can they set agenda for the future?

The writer is a publishing editor and advisor on public and media relations