By Ghost Writer
First things first—we, a collection of sensible media observers, hereby avow that in a society where the line between religion and business is growing thinner every day, religion must not be immune to public scrutiny.
In fact, the media—the public watchdog—must bark as loudly at beguiling cassocks, canonical caps, and nuns’ habits as they do at public thieves in designer suits.
That said, history and media scholars point to the importance of training journalists on how to cover religion in general, and the Church in particular—especially in countries like Kenya, where religion ranks alongside food, air, and water in the hierarchy of needs.
Sensitivity is the key word here. Any bias, real or perceived, when reporting on matters of religious faith in Kenya can easily be framed—especially by the notoriously over-religious—as an attack on God, the work of the devil. The ripples stirred by stories touching on churches—from whether or not they should be regulated to whether they need to turn down the volume of music systems (sometimes larger than the church buildings themselves)—are likely to create silent, and sometimes open, animosity between the media and the Church.
One such story that undoubtedly left many Catholic media audiences in dismay was Nation’s Wards of Evil, also published under the headline Divine Evil. The investigation, which alleged that a hospital run by Catholic nuns may have been involved in irregular medical insurance payouts, was widely hailed as an excellent piece of investigative journalism. It was, undoubtedly, the media playing its public watchdog role at its best.
Be that as it may, a month after the story aired—and after the applause had faded—media scholars may wish to confront a more uncomfortable question: was the story entirely objective, or was there some “divine evil” at work in Nation’s newsroom, subtly casting aspersions on the Catholic faith in Kenya?
In reporting the failings of one health facility run by a few Catholic nuns, did the reporter end up appearing to attack a faith held by millions of Kenyans?
Some context was necessary in the story. Context like, next to the government, Catholics run the largest number of health facilities in Kenya. The last time we checked, the Church accounted for close to 30 per cent of all healthcare facilities in the country, most of them operating under extremely difficult conditions.
But in NTV’s story—Wards of Evil or Divine Evil—the producers did little to remind viewers of the fact that Catholic health facilities are largely independent of the mother Church; that the Pope in the Vatican may not even be aware that a Catholic hospital exists in, say, Kathonzweni.
Granted, those who run Catholic health facilities may be nuns or priests, but they serve as medical professionals: there to give injections, not sacraments. As such, if there are one or two rogue actors in any Catholic health facility, they are rogue medics, not rogue Catholics.
Then there was NTV’s attempt to make the story “sexy” by crafting a provocative catchphrase instead of sticking to simple, fact-carrying wording. Critics of the story may argue that the phrase divine evil is, in itself, problematic, carrying a not-so-subtle hint of blasphemy in that nothing divine can also be evil, just as we do not speak of an evil God or a holy devil.
In more deeply religious societies, both the writer and the newspaper would most likely have faced serious backlash over such a headline.
