It’s a good thing Cord and Jubilee voters are celebrating media’s woes

What you need to know:

  • Reaction: It would be far worse if they ignored the media altogether.

An editorial director of the Nation once told me that he kept two in-trays in his office.

One was reserved for complaints from diehard Raila Odinga supporters who were adamant that the Nation was out to “finish” their man.

The other was for fanatical Mwai Kibaki partisans who were equally sure that the newspaper was part of a plot to bring down the government and that its editorial department was stuffed chokefull of Odinga supporters.

Watching the two piles rise almost at the same rate, he said, satisfied him that the newspaper and TV editorial staff were doing their jobs properly.

Those words came to mind watching the media being torn apart with a rare relish by Kenyans on social media in the wake of the digital migration drama.

Cord supporters were not unhappy with the blackout on the screens. The media made its bed. It must lie in it, they said.

According to this narrative, journalists helped the Jubilee team take power and should have no complaints that they are having a rough time under the new government.

Jubilee supporters were almost literally dancing in the streets. Stop being analogue, they told the Big Three. You are dinosaurs who must embrace change. Besides, you people have been fighting the government at every turn from day one.

Like all entrenched story lines, neither narrative stands up to scrutiny.

The media didn’t help UhuRuto win. In fact, few campaigns have had a more hostile relationship with the media.

Just go to any major newsroom and count the number of demand notices candidate Kenyatta’s lawyers sent into their offices.

There were more than for any other candidate in memory.

We will never know about the 50 per cent question, but Cord lost the election on December 19, 2012, not on election night.

That is the date voter registration data was published and it became clear that Jubilee had pulled a fast one on their rivals by mobilising their core supporters in record numbers.

The media is a scapegoat. The oft-repeated complaint about senior journalists going for coffee at State House in the early weeks of the administration is an irrelevant nugget.

NO COMPROMISE

In many advanced democracies, from Washington to London, the President holds numerous meetings, announced and unannounced, with editors and writers but that doesn’t mean that they leave those encounters with their independence compromised.

The complaint by Jubilee supporters is easier to dismiss. It is the media’s job to make the government uncomfortable.

The media is not an extension of government, although, of course, criticism should ideally not be of the gratuitous type.

Yet it is a good thing that people have these strong views about the media.

If TVs screens went blank, and everyone shrugged or yawned, that would spell trouble for the industry.

The agitation over this issue shows that the Kenyan media — comfortably the most vibrant anywhere on the continent outside South Africa despite all its weaknesses — matters.

I was shocked on a visit to the UK on an exchange programme as a teenage student to discover that opinion polls there rated the police as the most respected professionals and the media as among the least trusted people.  

In Kenya, for many years, the order was reversed with the media topping surveys as the most trusted institution and the police comfortably last.

That is a position the Kenyan media should be careful not to squander in the course of this battle.

An observer arriving from abroad would struggle to tell who the heroes or villains in the digital dust-up are.

The regulator has come across like an elephant on the dance floor: awkward, high-handed, obtuse, trampling on any parties with a different view with impunity.

But the media might also be accused of being stuck in their ways, failing to anticipate disruptive change and acting like a cartel.

Kenya would benefit if both sides beat a retreat and halted their race to the bottom. For now, though, all the hostile comments which have swept Facebook accounts such as NTV Kenya indicate that the media still matters.

Supporters of Jubilee and Cord may be railing against journalists and TV executives for different reasons, but it would be far worse if they opted to ignore the media altogether.