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)
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