For some strange reason, Mediascape has been keenly following the international media.
Last week, it was all about two of the biggest media organisations merging to form a media behemoth with a 10 million audience.
Well, a wag did send some feedback, calling us out for doomsayers, reminding us that the death of print newspaper has been predicted since the 1950s, and we still have newspapers on the streets every day.
The fellow was quick to point out that the print media will be here for a while in the same way the bible has.
Come to think of it – despite online craze – you do not see pastors googling sermons and their followers carrying laptops to church.
In fact, mobile phones are banned in all mainstream churches, and even the most techno-savvy pastor still drags a humongous bible, usually black, replete with a zipper, to the pulpit.
This might not be because these gadgets are evil – many of our pastors simply do not trust their congregations to be searching for online bibles during sermons.
Especially their younger congregants.
Still, this wag may have a point. There is something about touching what you are reading that makes many shun all those online books and go for more expensive hard copies.
Which means the print media might only go to extinction as soon as fellows who like to feel what they read go the path of the dinosaur.
But we digress.
Last week, the United Kingdom released what it called guidelines on domestic violence coverage.
While the increasingly liberal British media might easily take these, fold them nicely, and shove them, well, never mind where, the rules did raise pertinent questions which we in Kenya might need to discuss.
And seeing that nearly all our media laws are British in origin, let’s not argue that we have been independent since 1963.
The rules, in a nutshell, called the media out for sexist reportage of gender-based violence. How?
Well, we, in Mediascape did discuss it here in the past. But let’s do it again.
When a murderer, a ruthless killer probably high on something that his mother warned him against when he was growing up, kills a woman whose only crime was falling in love with the beast, we, and I quote the British example, report: “Jealous husband kills partner.”
Now, according to the British, and we are talking about last week, this is sexist reporting of gender-based violence. News makes it appear that the husband in this case was justified to kill a poor woman because he was jealous.
It gets worse.
According to the new rules, it is uncouth, barbaric and downright sexist to carry the picture of the murdered woman with the story and not that of her killer.
We said it here before, and we will say it again and again until the cows come back home, that men do not kill their partners because they are jealous. Men kill fellow human beings because they are murderers.
On this one, we are with the British!
And now for the ban bin.
How about we ban all those cliché quotes that we know very well are fake or our own creation to fill up space?
Quotes like: “I urge security agents to move with speed and bring to book perpetrators of last night’s attacks on innocent civilians.”
The basic rule of thumb of reporting is, report the way you speak. So, if your source says Aldibrontichronohontothologoss, either edit this out or call them out for faking an accent – both is better.
Oh, there was another gem last week: After delivery, the mother and the baby were given first aid at the Meridian Hospital.
Looks like giving birth is, well, an accident for both mother and kid.
And the last one: “Man wants smoking banned for health reasons”. Why else would smoking be banned? Unhealthy reasons?
Have a healthy week ahead, good folks of the media!
