I Accuse the Press for giving Esther Arunga hell on earth

The Esther Arunga story is stale news by now. Some issues surrounding it are in court and cannot be commented on. But its hysterical coverage tells us a lot about the low ethical standards and poor editorial tastes in Kenyan journalism.

When the story broke out a couple of weeks ago, I was in a hospital bed for the first time in my life.

Not knowing what was going on in my system to make me faint for doing simple tasks like answering a short call of nature, I could easily empathise with the former TV anchor who had suddenly resigned from her job and joined what was alleged to be a cult.

I sent a personal message to her cell phone, knelt down facing Lake Michigan, and said a heart-felt prayer that the media would just leave her alone.

I COULDN’T SEE WHAT WAS NEWSworthy in the Arunga story because, if I were an editor, I would publish a story about a fellow newsperson only if they won a big media award or if they cooked both their hands for lunch.

But the media have become so narcissistic, instead of reporting and analysing significant events, media personalities prefer to report about themselves or their colleagues, including taking us to their private weddings to witness the potential of their bourgeois libido as hard news.

If the media need to humanise news, let them present us with other people’s events, not footage of their own personal lives or events of their colleagues.

Granted, occasionally the resignation of a media personality, such as Lou Dobbs’s from CNN in November, will cause some ripples. But not to the extent the Kenyan media covered the Arunga saga. It was blown out of proportions.

I know there are people out there wagging their fingers and saying: you are just jealous because you’re not a celeb like Esther and no TV cameras came to your hospital bed.

I don’t think media houses are heaven. Be that as it may, when I started working with a newspaper on the cusp of the new millennium, there was a golden rule that stories about sheer threats — even bomb scares — would not see the light of day. I am surprised that these days the media report humdrum threats so routinely.

When Esther Arunga called a press conference to threaten to sue her parents and a top psychiatrist, the media should have given her a blackout. Indeed, they should report the matter again only when it appears before a court of law. This would protect her integrity and that of journalism in general.

In the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks details neurological disorders that lead us to altered perceptions of reality. As journalists, we are human. We can suffer all sorts of emotional problems, including neurological breakdowns.

The experiences and unedited images newspeople have to endure in their line of duty can be psychologically disturbing to say the least.

Therefore, we should ask our employers to strengthen the counselling departments to safeguard against explosive nervous breakdowns. We should also support one another rather than publicly jeer colleagues who appear, by our standards, to be headed too far in the wrong way.

As responsible journalists, we need to be careful against projecting our own mortal fears onto colleagues, seeking to demonise them in order to feel we are normal, to momentarily mask anxieties about our own possible tragic destiny working in a stressful environment.