MEDIASCAPE: Strengthen bureaus or continue with wheelchair journalism 

Three takes.

Take one: If there is one group of professionals that preaches water while licking wine glasses on matters devolution, then it is the Fourth Estate.

Here’s how.

We have scores of bureaus out there, which at best, only come in whenever a story breaks in the countryside. Even then, some media houses send their people from Nairobi to cover it, which, many bureau heads will tell you, is infuriating.

Now, save for a few State House stories, the big story no longer lives in Nairobi.  The big story is now in Wanjiku’s backyard.

This is why for one week, some dry patch of earth in Elgeyo Marakwet county had the entire nation hooked to the news, and was mentioned in Italy and South Africa.

Any media house worth writing home about should have focused on strengthening bureaus as soon as good old President Mwai Kibaki lifted that big book called the constitution in 2010, officially taking power away from Nairobi to 47 new ‘Nairobis.’

But what did we do? Nothing much- our bureaus continue to be run on shoe-string budgets; continue to be treated like far-flung outposts that largely operate on their own whims; whose sleepy ‘bureau chiefs’ (a very archaic title in itself) only come to Nairobi after receiving summons from their bosses.

Perhaps the only little effort we made was with radios. It is amazing the many radios targeting the countryside on air today. But even these are controlled from Nairobi, sometimes by fellows who cannot speak a single word in the vernacular they broadcast in.

The staffing in our bureaus is simply an embarrassment. We have entire bureaus with only one journalist on the pay roll. The rest are correspondents, some of them without as much as a retainer (and now how can they resist the brown envelop!)

Dear media owner: you would do well by dispatching most of your editors to these bureaus. As a one-way ticket. That is where the story is.

This, or close the bureaus altogether and let “journalists from Nairobi’ get away with their armchair journalism.

Take two: It is strange that we have not been seeing much reported on Brexit in Kenya, save for wire stories with little relevance for the average Kenyan reader.

But someone did report on the subject last week and managed to link Brexit to the average Kenyan in Karagita, Naivasha. The angle was simple: How Brexit will affect Kenya’s flower market.

It was a good story, and it was written by a Kenyan, only problem was – it was done for the BBC.

And, finally, take three.

Let us join hands with the Observer in banning the following words and phrases from our reportage: “A whooping Sh xxxxx million” (figures have a way of getting whooping coughs in our reportage); “Residents are up in arms.” (Which arms? AK47s?); “mixed reactions.” (In what ratio are they mixed? Half-half? Three-quarter-quarter?).

Then there are “irate residents” that are constantly taking to the streets, or, whenever they get happier, have “reason to celebrate” (is there a reason to mourn?) and lots of “raised eyebrows,” and fellows “smiling all the way to the bank.”

Finally, this “allegedly” business is beginning to make us read like rumourmongers. There is too much of it, especially in stories without sources, that it has become a source itself, allegedly.