Dear Mombasa Road: How did Clay Muganda’s piece, “My daughter and I took 21 years to find each other” earn two pages under National News on Saturday?
We are not saying here that Clay’s story, with all its intrigues, does not qualify for ‘the nationals’ on our news pages.
But there are stories reserved for National News and there are stories reserved for columnists and magazine pages, and every journalist, every editor, knows or ought to know the difference.
Sadly, the mix-ups are happening every day. The fact that Clay got two full pages for a story that, by all standards, did not qualify for ‘national news’, is symptomatic of the growing impunity within our newsrooms that sees stories run, not on the basis of newsworthiness, but on the basis of the faces behind the story.
Right from the intro, “Some people who have known me for long think I have only two sons because I used to write about them,” the story alienates thousands of readers, who have no idea who the writer is, least of all, his domestic shenanigans.
Which brings an ethical issue about the clear line between a journalist’s personal and professional life; about how journalists can use their positions and powers to put themselves at the front of the long queue of stories waiting to be told, and about the rapidly disappearing line between news and commentary.
We are not saying that a journalist’s story should not be told. Far from it. But we are saying a journalist’s story should not get more space or airplay in a media house than he or she works for, on any other merits besides newsworthiness.
This is something that all newsrooms must seriously consider when they are crafting their next editorial guidelines on what ought to run as national news and what ought to remain in the columns, entertainment pages and op-eds.
Still, it is not in our business to tell news desks what ought to be the bigger story and what to be a brief.
But it is our business to remind news desks of something called public interest and why it ought to be important when deciding what stories to ‘blow up’ and which ones to assign a few inches of space.
This is why we flag news desks that run acres of space and airplay of male voices while tucking away the voices of women, children, the youth and persons living with disability in the briefs.
Take, for instance, Abdimalik Hajir’s, “Families in agony look for missing loved ones” (The Standard, September 18).
From Garissa, Hajir must have struggled to file the gripping story about families of missing kin trooping to Garissa Referral Hospital Mortuary to identify their own from 11 decomposing bodies retrieved from River Tana.
Hajir informed us that some of the 11 bodies retrieved from the river had been weighed down with heavy stones strapped on their bellies, and that some had their eyes gorged out and their genitals missing.
A gripping story right here – especially coming in the wake of a series of mysterious disappearances of a growing list of people grabbed in the middle of the street, bundled into unmarked cars and driven away, never to be seen again.
In some progressive nations with a vibrant media that has more sensitive noses for stories, this would definitely have been a big story; perhaps as big as that furore created by bodies found floating downriver amid the gunfire in Ethiopia’s Tigray region.
In other democracies where the media lives up to its reputation as a public watchdog, teams would be on the ground giving live broadcasts from the area where the bodies were found; press crews would be camping outside the morgue where DNA tests were being done to identify the victims of a heinous crime.
But no – the folks that determine what story runs and what story gets killed did not think this story was worth blowing up. They gave it less than an eighth of a page.
Maybe the area where the story was set betrayed it. One can even imagine the smug look on the faces of the headline creators when the story was mentioned in some ‘headline-cooking’ meeting: “Garissa? Ah, I do not think that is news…the story is badly written…. we will send someone to check”.
Or maybe, someone thought it was not as important as their own Clay Muganda’s rather emotional story that would have been best whispered in a confessional.
