By Otuma Ongalo
“Tragedy as helicopter ferrying passengers from family event crashes: ‘No survivors’.”
This Tuko headline on August 9, 2026 caught my attention on Sunday morning. A helicopter crash in which there are no survivors is obviously newsworthy.
However, my attention was not just because of a helicopter crash. Only the previous day, Kenyans had been treated to images of President William Ruto’s widely covered family event, a pre-wedding, where numerous guests arrived by helicopter and the spectacle became a national conversation.
Against that background, a headline about a helicopter carrying passengers from a family event crashing, with no survivors, was bound to attract attention. The headline did not tell the reader where the crash had occurred. It was in Brazil, a click on the story revealed.
Looking at this critically, I find it difficult to see it as editorial oversight. To me, the story appears carefully selected and the headline deliberately crafted to align with President Ruto’s event without saying as much.
During journalism training, one of the tenets of news values taught is proximity – what happens closer to you is of greater interest than what happens far away, other factors held constant.
Brazil is some 10,000km away. Oddity, consequence, prominence and human interest are the other parameters of news values, and none of them, in my view, justify the selection of the Tuko story on the Brazilian chopper crash.
Since Tuko had not actually said that the helicopter had crashed in Kenya, that the passengers were connected to President Ruto’s event or even made an explicit reference to the previous day’s events, the headline could be defended as factually accurate.
But journalism is not only about whether the words used are individually defensible. It is also about the impression those words create in the mind of the audience. A headline can therefore be factually accurate and still be misleading.
Tuko’s Brazilian story choice and presentation, in my view, reflects a broader practice I would describe as contextual clickbait.
It is not the conventional form of clickbait in which a headline promises some shocking revelation and withholds the actual information merely to induce a click. This is subtler. It takes something already occupying the audience’s mind, finds a story elsewhere with a similar feature, and then removes the piece of information that would separate the two.
And once the story is opened, the immediate objective is achieved. But at what cost to journalism standards, integrity and ethics?
The Media Council of Kenya’s Code of Conduct for Media Practice, 2025, is quite specific about the responsibility of journalists in such circumstances. Among other requirements, Section 4 places an obligation on media practitioners to make all attempts to verify facts for accuracy and authenticity before publication. More directly relevant here, Section 5(e) requires headlines to accurately reflect the content and context of the subject matter. The Code also identifies sensationalism among the forms of media malpractice.
Headlines should not merely contain facts that can be defended in isolation. They should reflect the content and context of the story.
That is where the distinction between accuracy and misleading presentation becomes important.
Anyone who follows Tuko will recognise its ability to connect stories to whatever is currently occupying the Kenyan public imagination. The technique is commercially clever. It understands what makes people stop scrolling, what makes them curious and, ultimately, what makes them click.
It is true that Tuko has been extraordinarily successful in attracting an audience. The latest Media Council of Kenya State of the Media 2025 Survey Report, released in May this year, again ranked Tuko as the most visited news website in the country. Tuko was named by 33 per cent of respondents, ahead of Citizen Digital at 20 per cent, Standardmedia.co.ke at 14 per cent and Nation Africa at 10 per cent.
That level of reach is significant. Tuko’s success undoubtedly has many explanations, including its speed, volume, social-media strategy and understanding of the digital audience. However, if contextual clickbait is among the techniques used to achieve that success, it remains a blot on its acclaimed wide readership.
We have become accustomed to discussing misinformation and disinformation as though the problem begins only when a journalist publishes something that is demonstrably false. However, the deliberate construction of a misleading impression from facts that are individually true deserves attention.
That is why the MCK Code’s insistence on context is important. Accuracy cannot simply mean that every word can be defended after the fact. Responsible journalism must also consider what a reasonable reader is likely to understand from the way those facts are selected and presented.
This is particularly important for an organisation with the reach that Tuko now enjoys. The greater the audience, the greater the potential impact of a misleading first impression.
Audience trust is the lifeline that the platform should not take for granted. If you were to read some of Tuko’s social media platforms, you will notice readers complaining about inaccuracies and grammatical errors in its social media posts; However, the Platforms does not seem to care, nor does it bother to respond.
Otuma Ongalo is a veteran journalist and editor ongalootuma@gmail.com
