Somewhere in Nakuru last week, two children are found dead inside their bedroom with their father, a medical doctor, “fighting for his life”.
We will ignore “fighting for his life” for now, even though it is a paradoxical cliché in this case – to describe someone we reported to have tried to take his life as “fighting for his life”?
Back to the story: Like we have done in the past with stories of mystery deaths, we wasted no time running to the streets shouting that the doctor killed the children before trying to kill himself.
He later succeeded and we ran back to the streets the following day shouting: The doctor, who killed his two children, has finally succeeded in killing himself.
With not much to go on, we fed our audiences with innuendo, dropping hints here and there about what could have made the doctor kill his children and himself. So, we dropped unattributed lines such as “the doctor spoke with his wife over the phone before the killing” (nobody seemed to remember what exactly the couple spoke about, or whether indeed the person on the other end of the phone was indeed the wife).
We also dropped unverified hints to the effect that the doctor’s wife had planned to travel abroad for further studies, and that this could have triggered the doctor’s suicidal and murderous instincts.
By then, an autopsy had not been conducted and investigations completed to verify our story’s angle. Someone in our newsrooms must have kept a straight head long enough to point this out. The next day, we ran back to the streets shouting: An autopsy on the body of the doctor “suspected” to have killed his two children will be conducted today.
Great, at least we were back to our senses, and remembered the golden rule of journalism -do not believe everything you are told (add everything you see, smell, touch, feel, think etcetera).
Come day four reporting, and as we were yawning in our newsrooms waiting for the coroner’s report, someone had a light bulb moment and said: Hey, who was this doctor guy, by the way?
Then another features writer was dispatched to the killing scene, with specific instructions: Tell us who this guy was; speak to his friends and his family. This is what we ought to have done right from the word go.
It turned out that the doctor may not have been a very bad guy as we had portrayed him in our initial reporting; that he loved his children – he even loved to have them around in his private clinic as he saw his patients.
It also turned out that he loved his wife and that the two had “chatted” way past midnight on the weekend the killings occurred (again, who was there to confirm this?).
The story was not going as we had planned it, and we ran back to town, this time shouting: wait a minute – this guy was not very bad.
The result was a confused headline, “The good doctor who killed his children” (Daily Nation). Now, this is the most paradoxical headline in Kenya’s media history, where persons suspected of killing are “good”.
Perhaps, more than ever, we all need to revisit our notes on reporting murders, killings and mystery deaths. Why, we ought to have learnt from another killing that we reported early this month, incidentally, first broken by the Daily Nation.
It was a drive-by shooting somewhere in Meru, where we reported how a car drew alongside this man driving in front of it, and the occupants opened fire.
We ran to the streets shouting: A man has been shot dead…police say it could have been a criminal gang rivalry…they had been informed that some criminal activity was going on in the area…they suspect the man was a poacher…blah, blah.
A few days later, it turned out that the mystery man killed in the drive-by shooting was a senior Kenya Wildlife Service officer who had just dropped his child at school and was heading back home; and that the ‘suspect’ may have been ‘a good man’ killed by the bad guys.
Then we had to rewrite the story all over again and go shouting back to the streets with more confused headlines and story angles.
When will we ever learn that we must, in the heat of the moment, resist the temptation to press with anything else but facts, with verified information?
