First things first: What is ACP, anyone? And how many know that some six heads of state and government were in town last week for a three-day ACP conference?
Anyone knows what those fellows were doing in town besides photo ops at State House?
What they were discussing?
Don’t feel guilty for not knowing the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States (ACP), for many did not and still don’t.
Like another conference that happened at KICC the other day on something they call blue economy, or that other one at UNEP that they called UNEA-4, Kenyan journalists sent to those forums considered their day wasted.
Most of us like going to events with well scripted press releases or where you can ask a question in pidgin.
Maybe conference organizers in Kenya need to be trained on how to guide our journalists to the real story in these forums where they speak Gujarati without any translator in sight.
Or maybe we should introduce a small training called, “How to cover global forums without dozing off?”
Then came Wednesday and “a 35-year-old man committed suicide by jumping into a 90-foot well after a domestic squabble with his wife.” Good people, let us repeat this for the one millionth time – people do not commit suicide because they had a highfalutin quarrel with their spouses.
If they did, then the spouses ought to be liable for manslaughter, or womanslaughter.
So reporting here that this chap jumped into a 90-foot well “after a domestic squabble with his wife” insinuates that the poor woman pushed him into the well.
But we deviate – the story gets stranger:
“It is alleged that the deceased (and good people, these deceased fellows – how do they end up doing all manner of things when they are dead?), identified as Martin Oyugi Nyagolo of Kauda village “developed strange behaviour after he divorced his wife.”
Wait, whoever was reporting this must be a believer in African magic, aka kamuti. Either this or the reporter had developed a strange behaviour of reporting everything they were told, including gossip.
Oh, and still there was a stranger suicide story somewhere else. This time a “Man plunged into ocean in despair”. The man’s wife is reported to have told the police that her husband started behaving funny (A child would ask: behaving funny is behaving how?) the night before he took the deadly plunge into the ocean, hold your breath: “after receiving a strange call from his father who died many years ago….”
Strange reporting indeed, or is it, like the peculiar case before it, a case of reporting gossip as fact?
Unless our good friend Bob Collymore – bless his soul – went and set up a Safaricom booster in heaven, did this reporter seriously believe that a man can receive a call from heaven to go take a dip in the ocean?
And now for wrap up, this time from Fox News, that media outlet that our dearest friend, Donald Trump, has fallen out with of late.
Now, one Fox host came up with a rather sensational claim: That some women journalists have sex with their sources “all the time” in order to get scoops.
The host was discussing a movie by Clint Eastwood that depicted a journalist doing exactly that: Conducting horizontal interviews.
A co-host dug in, taking it further by insisting that it was not just female journalists who are inclined to conduct interviews on their backs – that male journalists do so too.
Well, the Observer is a family outlet, so we shall not dwell on this business of horizontal interviews.
But Fox did raise an important point: Yes, we have rules in media ethics about soliciting for stories but do we have one specifically forbidding horizontal interviews?
And in a country where brown envelops are said to generate scoops, might we have a category of journalists out there who get their scoops from between the sheets?
