Why did villagers kill Daisy Mbaluka, a primary school teacher in Kitui? The story went viral last week that the teacher at Ndooni Primary School was lynched because of poor KCPE results at her school.
How could this get printed without anyone in the news production cycle smelling a rat?
They said that Mbaluka was taking her two daughters to a secondary school in Kitui when she got dragged off the boda boda she was riding, “murdered, burned in front of her daughters,” according to KDRTV, an online news aggregator on January 10.
Many online outlets reported this last anecdote, about the teacher being burned in front of her daughters — without attribution or show of evidence.
Theinnersane.com (don’t roll your eyes), a self-professed, creative (meaning, non-journalistic) website wrote January 10: “Ndooni Primary School Teacher Burnt Alive After Kenya Exams.”
Why are we citing fringe publications? Because it doesn’t matter. When a story starts to gather steam and goes viral, it comes at you from everywhere. Facts, opinion, propaganda, everything gets blurred.
It’s exactly in such times that the professional, mainstream media should provide sunlight. So how did the latter do?
Citizen Digital ran with this headline on January 8: “Teacher killed, body burnt after parents protest over ‘poor’ school results.”
The story hit the airwaves, with many broadcast stations ending the breaking news with the tired refrain, “police are looking for suspects.”
The Star even murdered the wrong teacher. “TSC recalls six teachers after head teacher murdered at Ndooni Primary school,” the paper wrote online in a January 9 headline. By all accounts, the head teacher is alive and well and giving interviews (about him in a minute).
Look, this story embarrassed reporters.
Here at the Observer, where noses are always sniffing, eyes peeled for great stories of the week — or otherwise — we promptly flagged this story. One of our born sceptics called it this way: “This story must have been filed from Pluto.”
What was wrong with the picture? Did Mbaluka’s death really have anything to do with her being a teacher whose students flopped KCPE? The school head teacher has since ruled this out. According to the Standard on January 10, head teacher Dickson Musya said that if this was about exam performance, he would have been attacked, not his teachers.
A post doing the rounds in Whatsapp over the weekend accurately captured the matter in three words: “It’s very complicated.”
The post listed three theories from the ground. One, that the community accused Mbaluka of harbouring evil spirits, which affected her students – a reporter can’t do much with evil spirits.
Two, that Mbaluka had marital problems and that she was living with an armed conman — enough motive for murder? A reporter should ask.
Three, that Mbaluka would lure men into her house where her armed conman and other thugs would pounce on the unsuspecting men and blackmail them for, in one case, up to Sh100,000 – now that, fact or not, should arrest a reporter’s attention.
The point? Social media suggested that this was about pent-up community rage, a gathering storm that turned into a powder keg at the confluence of bad exam performance, parents’ complaints and threats to close the school.
And sure enough, after the dust settled mainstream media found its proper footing and shone some light on the narrative.
“Police now say dead teacher was suspect in torture case,’ the Nation wrote January 10. “Murder of teacher may have had no link with exams,” the Standard wrote January 11.
Lessons learnt? News reporting, even breaking news, should be as complete as possible within its time capsule. She said, he said, is never enough. Seek out context. Provide background. Otherwise, the script is not informative. Or, worse, plain misleading.
Sure, it’s easy for us armchair reviewers to criticise botched coverage of a story using the rear-view mirror, you might say. Who could have foreseen the full picture! Fair enough. But nobody said good journalism was easy. Approaching every story casually is what trips many a hard-working reporter.
The question to ask is this: what to do to avoid being a sucker? A useful tip: come to the scene with good old healthy dose of scepticism. Bring this to every breaking story.
Does this guarantee fool proof accuracy? No, but when the reader sees that a reporter did everything they could to dig around all angles of a story, they trust the reporter. They credit the reporter for doing his job, her job. And that’s enough.