Mine is a quest for proportion in reportage
As I remarked recently, our newspapers have an unhealthy and incurable fixation with politics.
The Nation’s page 10 lead headline on Wednesday took the case. It concerned Vice-President Kalonzo Musyoka’s remarks on the MPs’ recalcitrance on taxation.
Of course, it was a political story.
For our MPs are nothing else but politicians (in the most degrading sense of that term).
The media had widely reported Prime Minister Raila Odinga as having cleared his tax arrears.
The VP had not.
This, clearly, was why the reporter was so excited about what Mr Musyoka might say about it.
For the VP and the PM are deadly political rivals.
It is thus a certainty that any event which seems to depict them at loggerheads will create a racy headline.
One can understand this for a commercial outfit for which headlines are a major stock-in-trade.
What is despicable is the habit of plucking juicy aspects of a speech and blowing these up out of all proportion to the content of the real event.
Mr Musyoka was officially launching a historic publication — The Kenya Yearbook 2010 — which I had played a central role in producing — as a director (along with Esther Kamweru, Mundia Muchiri and others) of a budding parastatal called the Kenya Yearbook Editorial Board.
If I say that propaganda is the board’s main task, most readers will take it very negatively because of their distorted understanding of the term “propaganda”, an understanding twisted beyond recognition by the general misuse of that term ever since Joseph Goebbels.
But I affirm that propaganda is the occupation of every communicator.
Ours, however, is a special communication assignment.
Those who appointed us — President Mwai Kibaki, Information minister Samuel Poghisio and Permanent Secretary Bitange Ndemo — want us to propagate as many facts and figures as possible about Kenya, to weave these data into one whole yum-yum story — the story of Kenya — and to disseminate that story worldwide.
Development activities
Note the verb to “propagate”. It means to gather factual information, manufacture that information into an appetising form and make it public so that the public can plough the idealised form back into the development activities to excite their speed and enhance their quality.
The basic premise is that only if such a story is told both as artistically as possible and as objectively as possible can it inspire the people and their potential well-wishers the world over to achieve their development goals rapidly and qualitatively.
To be sure, Kenyans and their government do some very dismaying things.
But they also work extremely hard and often marvellously creatively.
They produce all the food that we eat, pave the roads that link us together, turn the lathes that yield our manufactured requirements, teach our next generation of workers and leaders, make and then implement laws — however flawed — that make us orderly, play the games and the music that entertain us.
But you wouldn’t know it from our newspaper pages. Our headlines seem to be preoccupied with murder, rape, theft, robbery, IDPs, hate speech, parochial politics, drug abuse, tribalism, Mr Moreno-Ocampo.
How refreshing it would be if our newspapers began “splashing”, not a matatu crash but the road revolution, not Mr Isaac Ruto, but Mr Mzalendo Kibunjia.
No, I don’t say that we should sweep any of our shames under the carpet. Mine is only a quest for proportion in reportage.
Yes, Mr Musyoka’s remark on taxation was interesting. But it was hardly his main point.
Yet the Nation’s story — a very long one — was devoted 100 per cent to that remark.
It totally ignored all the vastly more important statements by the VP about the nation’s development aspirations and about the reason we were gathered there, namely, how the Yearbook can contribute to that development.
That is why I call it a failing in journalism.
