A renewed battle for the eyeballs has raged for over two weeks now. Citizen TV stormed town on a poaching frenzy that has left distant competitors gasping for air. Alas! Mr SK “Moneybags” Macharia has grabbed all the big names on Kenyan television – including a couple the station has been parading ad nauseam.
Citizen also unveiled a swanky new look, lo! “It is timely, promising, authoritative, brilliant and captivating,” they crowed, sparing no adjective. But TV news cannot be any of that by merely hauling in a bevy of poached presenters. It is hype.
Anyway, look at KTN. They have been stunned into grumpy silence. What they might do to Mr Moneybags if they found him tangatangaring in Kawangware one of these days, only God knows. A serious Kenyan reporter would write that the Mombasa Road honchos have gone back to the drawing board.
Cut to the quick, a bloodied and battered NTV attempted to flaunt its own pretty faces too, complete with a fake anchoring couple.
“Kenyan television viewers have been following the newest anchoring couple in town closely even camping on their social media platforms with all sorts of comments,” Nairobi News, published by Nation Media Group, celebrated.
“The newly paired anchors have had viewers commenting on how great their chemistry on set is. Some went to greater lengths of recommending that the two start a relationship.”
So, this is what television journalism is about for NMG?
Of course Denis Okari and Olive Burrows are not husband and wife like Citizen TV’s “power couple” Rashid Abdallah and Lulu Hassan. Rashid quit NTV the other week, one of many journalists to flee Nation Centre in recent months. In the circumstances, one sympathises with NTV’s desperation to create its own celebrity “couple”.
Mr Moneybags is unapologetically aggressive. His ambition to expand his media empire to ends of the Earth is not in doubt. One gets the impression that Macharia would stop at nothing to stay far ahead of the pack. That seems to mean not only pouring monies into his operations but also throwing a well-aimed kick at a competitor’s cojones.
Now, Citizen TV looks pretty much like a camel – a horse designed by a committee of Eskimos. You have chunks of NTV joined to parts of KTN, K24 and so on.
Television is an audio-visual medium, hence the obsession with pretty faces. But it is the same faces that keep hopping from one station to another, with hardly any opportunity given to fresh talent. Turns out TV, which is supposedly a mark of media progress, ironically remains quite conservative on this score. Anyone out there dreaming of one day becoming a TV star in Kenya must pray without ceasing – and plant a seed.
TV stations also spend an inordinate amount of resources on news presenters and show hosts while investing comparatively little in strengthening reporting. In Citizen TV’s new hires, for example, there is only one seasoned reporter: Enoch Sikolia, formerly of NTV.
The biggest gap in nearly all TV stations lies with field reporting. It lacks professional gravitas. That is why TV news is full of crappy reports about what politicians said and silly little tales of lovers “stuck” in their lodging or a drunkard chasing his wife with a panga over missing 50 bob. Or a butcher in Kerugoya who earns a living by, well, selling meat.
And when some big politician kicks the bucket, one can always count on TV reporters to turn themselves into mourners – wailing more than the bereaved.
With devolution, a lot is happening in the counties that would keep a serious reporter busy. Counties are investing in new projects, lots of money is lost to corruption each year. What is happening to education, beyond reports about the burning of dorms or a KCPE candidate delivering a bouncing baby boy on the second day of the exam?
Are those referral hospitals that have sprouted everywhere really working or they are just damn buildings? How are new religious movements shaping people’s outlook on life? Do new crop and animal varieties developed at research institutions ever reach producers at the so-called grassroots? With what outcomes?
Related to poor investment in field reporting is neglect of investigative journalism. Take your mike, place it on the podium at a political rally, funeral or some other event, record the speeches, edit and you have a story. Everyday. Clean journalism. No muckraking.
With top-heavy stations like Citizen TV, you end up with lots of small stories about cows eating grass, entire parts of Kenya not covered and plenty of studio interviews featuring the same talking heads. Why would one be forced to sit for 30 minutes watching an interview with Moses Wetang’ula or William Ruto? Is there anything new one can learn from such an interview?
Well, we are sure no one would enjoy a TV newscast presented by an anchor who looks like she was run over by cement truck on Mombasa Road, or like he just woke up from a chang’aa den in Kangemi. Looks matter. But form must not trump substance.
