The media should let the dead rest with their dignity intact

If there is one thing I am so sure about, it is that the freedom we have fought for and achieved to be able to express ourselves freely must be jealously guarded by all of us.

Some of us may care to remember the days when we used to discuss matters in whispers and looked over our shoulders to see who was listening.

During those days journalists were jailed and detained. Lecturers and other people were detained without trial for saying what they thought was the truth. That was the era of dictatorship and thank God we overcame it.

Now we are in the era of freedom and I am sure few people would dispute the fact that the media of mass communication have played a key role in rallying Kenyans together around the reality of fighting for their basic freedoms and rights.

There cannot be a doubt that the freedom to express oneself and compare one’s ideas with those of others who also express themselves freely has a liberating effect. As a matter of fact a lot of the developments that have happened around the world have been because people are able to express themselves freely even as they differ with others’ ideas.

FRONT PAGE

The one area that worries me a little is the manner in which our media report tragedies. I have this awful feeling that sometimes there is some insensitivity in reporting death, murder, accidents and so on. Just this last week we were treated to a front page filled with bodies of the victims of the Mandera attack.

Quite often when there is an accident, one will see horrifying pictures in the paper or journalists going into hospital wards interviewing very wounded fellow Kenyans. Could there be another way of reporting the same stories without the gory details?

There are certain mysteries that surround the human person which make his or her humanity complete. When these mysteries are overexposed, that human person is, to a large extent, stripped of their human dignity. Even a dead person must be accorded dignity.

The dignity of a victim of an accident must be upheld at all times. In more civilised societies, no television cameras are allowed anywhere near a hospital ward after a disaster in which human beings have been injured.

Disasters are already horrifying without amplifying them. Information is important but the way it is packaged must respect certain fundamental aspects of human existence. We may sometimes package it in a way that seems to celebrate the culture of death, bloodshed, murder and plunder.

Father Wamugunda is Dean of Students, University of Nairobi; [email protected]