Good journalism will still win despite hordes of keyboarders

My colleague John Kamau and I have been unpopular in recent days. I have been reporting with Kamau for a time and he is the easiest person to work with: He doesn’t get on your nerves, whatever is happening, whether clambering over smelly bags of coffee in Murang’a or waiting patiently in some guy’s office for hours.

We complement each other very well. He is the scientist, an archaeologist actually by training, who loves documents and arcane details. I am, I like to believe, the frustrated poet in a reporter’s frumpy chinos; I will go back to the scene to look at a building a second time just to figure out how to describe it. And when we are working a source, I keep the source busy, talking to them, cracking weak jokes as Kamau pores over their files. So I am humint, he is sigint — if you know what I mean.

REPORTERS SUFFER

He is a hell of a reporter. His is the integrity of an oak: Even without saying it, it is understood that, if need be, we will die protecting our sources and we will never sell our stories. And even though a good story sets his wonky heart beating, it pleases me to trust his fidelity to the facts and to know, over time, that the cautious professionalism of a Nation editor never deserts him. The ability to resist a good story is the mark of a great journalist.

There is one good reason to expose good journalists like Kamau to the abuse and character assassination that good reporters suffer from in a country that believes in politics, intellectual dishonesty, corruption and greed for positions, but not in integrity and professionalism. The survival of our profession is in their hands.

SHRED REPUTATIONS

For decades, journalism has survived and prospered by telling audiences what happened yesterday. Reporters did the first cut of history. Today, it’s on some hard disk somewhere and you can watch it live on Facebook. Even good old muckraking has been taken over by bloggers, who get tips and proceed to shred reputations to tatters without so much as offering the target an opportunity to contradict. Reporters have been disrupted out of their colourful socks by this mass of content creators with phones, data bundles and 500,000 Twitter followers. For journalism to create value, for the modern reporter to establish new product boundaries, we have to bring into play character and professional skills unavailable to untrained content creators.

FONDLE FACTS

The one thing that the clever Sorros crowd, which built a following on our pages, does not realise is that there are only so many smart ways you can rearrange words and fondle facts. In the final analysis, comment, however compelling, becomes boring. People become resentful with being talked down at by a tiresome, negative activist.

The future of news journalism is investigative, and not just descriptive but revelatory. Journalists have to stop reporting what happened yesterday but say what will happen tomorrow. It’s back to the future. It’s gum shoe work, looking through key holes and spending endless hours following folks around town, poring over documents and doing some smart analysis and exposition. This requires a certain skills set and distinctive character traits.

PERSONAL AGENDA

Investigative journalism is 90 per cent sourcing, five per cent analysis and five per cent good writing. The hardest thing is to cultivate and manage sources — an army of people who trust you with tips and evidence and, sometimes, their lives. Ninety per cent of sources are scoundrels: They are leaking to fix someone or prosecute a personal agenda.

Few people in their right mind will put their lives, reputations, families and future at risk just to help a reporter. Some might do it for altruistic purposes, like honestly fighting evil, but you have to pray for over many years to get one. The competent reporter strikes a balance between the interests of his story and being used by his sources to advance their agenda. The ideal situation is where the reporter is skilful enough to convince the source that he is using the reporter while, in actual fact, the reporter is exploiting the resource for his story.

HUMBLE COURAGE

Good journalism is consequential. It is all very well for people to get a warm feeling after reading something but advancing and protecting democracy and changing society takes conviction and resolute reporting. Washington Post reporting in February last year revealed a warning by the Attorney-General that Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was lying about his contacts with the Russians, precipitating his sacking. The same paper’s reporting basically brought down Richard Nixon and did a lot to change the political culture in Washington.

After a hard day on Wednesday, for the first time in nearly 20 years, I turned down a perfectly good story. And as I drove home, I learnt that Agriculture PS Richard Lesiyampe was to be arrested in the morning. But I didn’t turn my car around and head back to the newsroom. My spirit was weary; I just wanted a shower and sleep.

Yesterday was a beautiful day; there was no conflict in my spirit. What changes and preserves our world is not dishonesty, greed and cowardice. Sometimes it is honest effort, the humble courage and moral clarity of a good reporter. And the Nation, thank God, is still full of them.

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