Let us begin by re-stating the basic rule of good journalism for the umpteenth time: If your mother says she loves you, check it out.
To this, throw in another rule of thumb – if you heard it from another media house, check it out too.
For sure, something is amiss when a TV station interviews a woman in prison who comes up with a heartrending story about how she has been wrongly incarcerated, and the next day the print media runs with the same story entirely from the TV clip.
When a clever lawyer or the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions pokes holes on the story the next day, we are all left with egg on our faces and lose a vital link between us and our audiences: trust.
That’s take one.
Our media has been accused of not giving international contexts to local stories. Nothing in this world happens in isolation, not even our local politics. Whatever is happening in Nairobi has happened in New York or Timbuktu.
Here, credit goes to a few journalists who covered the ‘ Nairobi-car-free-day’ story, and not only reminded their audience that this was not an entirely new phenomenon; that other cities in the world were doing it; and above all, told us why they succeeded and why ours was bound to fail. That is called contextualising.
We can only hope that in the future, we shall be able to contextualise international stories for our local audiences. And why not? The West has acres of stories about us, whereas we, at best, spare only a page or two for their stories, just because we do not bother to give their story a local context.
A good example to illustrate this was our coverage of the Brazil dam burst in January, where we simply regurgitated international news outlets in our reportage, forgetting that we had our own dam burst tragedy eight months ago.
As survivors of Patel Dam tragedy fight for compensation, perhaps it is not too late to compare Brazil’s handling of the tragedy with our own, may be in terms of punishing culprits (as we speak, Brazil has jailed some), government reaction and paybacks?
Moving on, anyone who has been following the Kenyan media in the last few months will be forgiven for concluding that women, and good-looking women for that matter, are, like the white rhino, an endangered species.
We have been so intent of recreating “Death in Happy Valley” stories that it is surprising no country has issued a travel advisory for its female tourists intending to visit Nairobi. Still, no media critic will begrudge our reportage on murder stories, especially when they have an intriguing love angle. They make for good human interest stories.
Be that as it may, we still have to remember the first rule at the beginning of this discourse: If your mother says she loves you, check it out, and report with facts not with the emotion of the moment.
Take our reportage of the recent murder of Mary Wambui. Our style of reporting was no different from the one we employed in reporting Sharon Otieno’s killing in September last year (by the way, are we not guilty of killing the Sharon story after she was buried?) and shortly after, our reporting of Monica Kimani’s killing.
In the three cases, we seemed to use the same script: make the story as juicy as possible; squeeze the juice to the last drop. The “How xxxx murdered” line is probably a template lying in our newsrooms, awaiting the next murder story. All we have to do in the next story is fill the xxxx.
This is fine, no one will begrudge us for splashing our pages and lead stories scarlet with tragic love stories. Nobody, except the families of the people we suddenly begin to treat as characters in our ‘Death in Happy Valley’ stories. But the problem with reporting love stories is where love turns blind and unpredictable. Untangling love’s story is even blinder and more unpredictable.
Well, if love is blind, it should not make a journalist covering the story blind to the extent of forgetting the tenets of journalism. Equally, if love makes blood boil, it should not make a reporter’s blood boil so much that he or she weeps more than the families of Romeo and Juliet in reporting their deaths.
This, or we shall be dealing with some very angry lawyers and love’s ambulance chasers some years down the line arguing, and justifiably so, that we condemned their clients long before they were heard, and demanding a couple of millions in compensation.
On this one, let us corrupt this ‘mother-love’ journalism rule thus: If your mother says your father killed so-and-so, check it out.
See you next week!
