[kictanet] Kenya: The Media is Not Innocent

[alice]

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=41049

KENYA:
The Media Is Not Innocent
Kwamboka Oyaro

*NAIROBI, Feb 2 (IPS) - The media was partly blamed for the Rwandan 
genocide 14 years ago which left nearly one million people dead in 100 
days. "Kill the Inkotanyi [cockroaches]!" a local radio station urged 
its listeners at the time. *

"30 Days in Words and Pictures: Media Response in Kenya During the 
Election Crisis" -- a workshop organised here last week by 
California-based media advocacy group Internews -- enabled media 
professionals to conduct a "self-audit" of the role local media played 
in the post-election violence. The audit revealed that media -- 
especially vernacular radio stations -- might be partly to blame for the 
on-going violence sparked off by the announcement of Mwai Kibaki as 
winner of the Dec. 27 elections.

The violence has reportedly claimed over 1,000 lives and displaced some 
250,000 people since the December election.

David Ochami, a commissioner with the Media Council of Kenya, told IPS 
that long before the elections were held, vernacular radio stations had 
ignited ethnic consciousness among the listeners "making them support 
leaders from their own tribe and harbour bad feelings about people from 
other communities."

"The ethnic hate our radio station was propagating about those from 
outside the community was unbelievable. I can’t repeat any of those 
expressions at this forum," said a journalist with a vernacular radio 
station. "The unfortunate thing is we let these callers speak vile and 
laughed about it."

"We took sides in the issue and we became subjective, forgetting our 
professional tenet of objectivity and neutrality. In fact, this 
polarization was so bad in the newsrooms that some broadcast journalists 
refused to cover or read news that wasn’t favourable to the candidate or 
party they supported," said a journalist.

In fact, leading up to the elections the local media conveyed 
inflammatory campaign messages as advertisers’ announcements.

"Both print and broadcast media put money ahead of responsibility by 
accepting and conveying paid-for hate material," Mildred Baraza, a 
Nairobi- based journalist told IPS. "This could have incited the 
audience, and when they got a chance they avenged as a result of the 
pre-election messages," she said.

Redemtor Atieno, another Nairobi-based journalist who also helped to 
organise the workshop, is confident that the media’s biased reporting 
contributed to the mayhem in the country.

"Professionalism was thrown to the dogs as tribe and partisanship 
carried the day. We failed our audience by conveying interests of 
politicians without questioning the impact of our stories," Atieno told 
IPS.

Participants at the workshop also blamed media owners for playing a 
major role in encouraging the violence. "They had vested interests in 
either camp of the political divide," a reporter with Kenya Broadcasting 
Corporation (KBC) said, adding that he and his colleagues wanted to tell 
the real story but they couldn’t because the stories could portray the 
government in a bad light.

"We had beautiful clips and stories from the field, but we went back to 
the newsroom knowing that the story would never be used," he said.

Even privately owned media owners who backed different political parties 
had a hand in the stories that were carried. If it was about the party 
they supported, they exaggerated the story and generally depicted the 
opponents in negative ways.

"The media organizations refrained from telling the world the truth 
about what was happening," Ochami told IPS. "There has been a tendency 
of portraying the Kenyan crisis as a problem between two ethnic groups 
-- where one [Kibaki’s Kikuyu] is victimized by another [opposition 
leader Raila Odinga’s Luo]. Any other story on the contrary is 
downplayed or ignored," Ochami explained.

There are those who believe the media is innocent and the violence 
currently rocking the country was bound to happen anyway -- that 
historical economic inequalities among the Kenyan communities had to 
boil over at some point in time.

"The public vented long bottled-up anger. It was meant to explode 
whether the media encouraged it or not," said a journalist at the 
workshop. "Many people voted last year for change and it was a protest 
vote against years of inequalities. When they realized this would not 
happen when Kibaki was declared winner, they exploded."

Mitch Odera the moderator of the workshop and media consultant said one 
of the causes of Kenya’s unrest is the immaturity of its democracy. 
"There hasn’t been competitive democracy in our country. That is our 
problem," Odera told the participants at the workshop.

The government was also blamed for the chaos because it slapped a 
blanket ban on live broadcasters soon after violence broke out in the 
country.

"The ban did not extend to international media including the Internet 
which many Kenyans accessed and spread the word. This led to skewed 
information and hence panic and more destruction and deaths," said one 
journalist from the electronic media.

The Editors Guild -- an organization of editors from all media 
organizations -- went to court this week to challenge the ban on 
broadcasters.

Participants at the workshop also heard the first hand experiences of 
journalists who covered the post election violence. Practioners 
complained about threats to their lives and complained that they felt 
segregated from the rest of the country.

As the workshop was taking place participants were well aware that 
several political writers and analysts had received death threats for 
writing stories that were viewed as unfavourable towards the government.

(END/2008)