[kictanet] Kenya: The Media is Not Innocent

Tue Feb 12 12:48:25 EAT 2008

Hi,
Please allow me to comment on this matter and
apologize for dragging you back to an issue that had
been posted and quickly dismissed.

The media did not operate in isolation during and
after the elections. And before we point fingers at
the media and blame it for everything under the sun,
perhaps we should first try to understand who the real
players were in the elections and the general genesis
of the crises. And in doing so we may need to ask
ourselves these questions.

What role did politicians play in this crises? 
What about the churches and mosques?  
What about the security forces? 
What about the Electoral Commission?
And finally what role did the media play?  

My view is that we need to have a task force as
suggested by the minister of information probably
under the media council of Kenya to audit all these
players, only then can we truly say who was innocent
and who was guilty.

But i would also like to bring in another issue.
During the elections the media was exercising the self
regulation rule and a lot of the stories that were
filed during this period were censored because they
were hate speeches and issues not fit for printing but
we thought it would all die out after the elections
and things would also get back to normal.

Now on hindsight we ask ourselves should we have
censored those stories or should we have reported them
as presented? 

i will be happy to hear your views the above.
cheers.
Kanja 

--- alice <alice at apc.org> wrote:

> 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)
> 
> _______________________________________________
> kictanet mailing list
> kictanet at lists.kictanet.or.ke
>
http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/listinfo/kictanet
> 
> This message was sent to: kanjawaruru at yahoo.com
> 
=== message truncated ===

      ____________________________________________________________________________________
Be a better friend, newshound, and 
know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile.  Try it now.  http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ 