In a newspaper, one small mistake can be very costly

A resident of Kisii reads the Daily Nation on July 24, 2015. Media consumers tend to identify themselves with the stories that they read. PHOTO | BENSON MOMANYI | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Media consumers tend to identify themselves, at least emotionally, with the stories that they read in their local newspapers.
  • Most people — being human — relate themselves to important world events through the media.

Consider the caption on page 10 of The Standard of April 3: “Security officers at the gate of Garissa University College. The university marked two years since the terror attack yesterday …” The question is how you can mark two years of it if “the terror attack” had occurred only “yesterday”.

According to the picture caption, the onslaught on Kenya’s Garissa University occurred both “yesterday” and yet two years ago.

The problem, then, is that the element of time — the adverb “yesterday” — has been terribly misplaced.

MISPLACING WORDS
It is an example of one problem that perennially besets journalists and other users of English (not only in East Africa but worldwide) — namely, the practice of misplacing certain parts of speech in a sentence, thus altering their intended meanings.

Here, the adverb of time — the word yesterday — is wholly wrongly placed.

Where it has been put, it qualifies, not the verb “marked” — as it should — but only, terribly wrongly, the noun-phrase “terror attack”.

The question is: What had happened to all the editorial stages of newspaper production on that day?

Where had the sub-editors, the proof readers and the revise sub-editor gone?

EMOTIONAL IDENTITY
Where it has been misplaced (in our example above), the adverb yesterday means that the attack had taken place only on the day before the newspaper’s relevant edition hit the streets.

Yet the adverb yesterday and its counterparts elsewhere — all represented interrogatorily by the question when? — are among the most important words in reported speech.

In a newspaper’s news pages, it is what informs the reader as to how close, both temporally and emotionally, he or she is to such an event.

I italicise the adjective close because media consumers tend to identify themselves, at least emotionally, with the stories that they read in their local newspapers or hear through their own radio sets or see on their own television screens.

RELEVANCE OF STORIES
Where it can be quantified and even analysed in terms of quality, the intensity of emotional identity between a newspaper item and the human being consuming it is the measure of success by the producer of such a journalistic piece and, indeed, of all other works of art.

Most people — being human — relate themselves to important world events through the media.

A volcano that claims hundreds of human lives will interest Kenya’s newspaper readers as intensely as anything else even if it be the Vesuvius, and even if it occurs as far away as Saskatchewan, partly because Kenya has its own potentially active and potentially catastrophic volcanoes.

Emotionally, that is what helps to bring the consumer of any news medium as close as possible to the events even in far-away lands no matter where, on a planet like our earth, which has become increasingly infinitesimal in communication terms.

It is what should make humanity increasingly aware that, as a species, all members have the same fate.

And it should urge all artists to enter what the poet John Ciardi called a “sympathetic contract” with all their potential consumers worldwide.