The media must re-evaluate their mission

Rescue workers begin mandatory evacuations in the area beneath the Barker Reservoir as water is released after Hurricane Harvey caused widespread flooding in Houston, Texas on August 31, 2017.
PHOTO | MARK RALSTON| AFP

What you need to know:

  • The arrival of Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Louisiana this week illustrated the immense suffering that humanity experiences as a result of its reluctance to acknowledge its immense contribution to the changing weather patterns.
  • Hurricane Harvey resulted from rising water levels and increased temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.
  • Newspapers have dug their own graves by clamouring for respectability and joining the status quo.

American President Donald Trump coined the term ‘fake news’ and dropped warnings on climate change into that information box.

The arrival of Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Louisiana this week illustrated the immense suffering that humanity experiences as a result of its reluctance to acknowledge its immense contribution to the changing weather patterns.  

Hurricane Harvey resulted from rising water levels and increased temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.

However, few analysts or media houses have bothered to investigate the human role in those changes.

They are more preoccupied with searching for heroic stories amidst the catastrophe. They are as yet unable to acknowledge that, like New Orleans in 2005, the majority of victims are African-Americans.  

OBSOLETE

Newspapers are not just becoming obsolete because of the global access to the internet.

Many have dug their own graves by clamouring for respectability and joining the status quo. Last week, the experienced and respected Jon Snow of Channel 4 News in England lambasted the press for its failure to investigate warnings from residents of Grenfell Towers in London where over 80 were burned to death last month.  

The residents had maintained a community blog on the likelihood of an inferno but journalists never bothered to read or follow up. Snow said that “the media are comfortable with the elite with little awareness, contact or connection with those who are not elite”. The point that Snow is making is that the media are far removed from reality and that the “echelons from which media is drawn do not reflect the population amongst whom we live”.  

WEALTHY

He could have said the same about Kenyan media. Kenya media houses are professional, well-staffed and wealthy.

They attract smart, competent folk to their work places but there is a huge sense of unreality about their approach and presentation of Kenyan life today.

News anchors aspire to be fashionable, glamorous celebrities, forgetting what inspired them to seek a vocation in communication in the first place.

There are a handful of brilliant investigative journalists who struggle to make a living by holding the powerful to account.

However, most of what you read and view is from well-dressed, well-spoken slick journalists who view the corrupt political class as partners in setting the national agenda.

They may have been raised in poor, rural areas but they are now urbane, city slickers totally out of touch with the real Kenya.

GENERAL ELECTION

Perhaps this was best illustrated by the appalling analysis of the general election. Media houses substituted wide coverage for informative and investigative analysis.

As a result, you will only find critical analysis of election events in a few foreign sources like Helen Epstein in the New York Review of Books.

This is not a condemnation of incompetence but pointing out that the media have forgotten their mission and the media owners are setting the agenda.

So we once more got saturated with the ‘peace agenda’ during election time. 

Social media, too, have not made any real contribution to connecting with the excluded, the left behind as Pope Francis refers to them.

There is an urgent need for citizen-led journalism and for diversity. Otherwise we will all become illiterate, unchallenging citizens.

 Father Dolan is a Catholic priest based in Mombasa. [email protected] @GabrielDolan1