‘Padding’and other nonsense in our headlines

Naturally, most headlines of Kenya’s newspapers will stand on top of news stories concerning events that have taken place in the same country. Yet Third World journalism has long nurtured the use of words which add absolutely no semantic value to a headline. Called “padding”, that practice is common in Kenya’s newspapers.

Thus we read the following headline in a Nairobi daily on March 20: “What government must do to improve oral health in Kenya”. In that way, the sub-editor raised another question: Why “in Kenya”? To what other government could the story have been referring? That question was inevitable because, in what other country can the Nairobi-based government take any action to solve that problem?

APPALLING

In other words, in that context, the words “in Kenya” served no purpose whatsoever. For, in semantic terms, what wouldn’t the sub-editor have achieved if he or she had left out the words “in Kenya”? I ask because, on any page, such a headline is an absolute waste of words in an instrument in which space is among the chief economic commodities.

To use such words in such a context is to fill space with nonsense. On a news page, words which add no news or semantic value to a headline are usually condemned as “padding”, namely, the practice of using words in a headline merely so as to fill the space ordered by the newspaper’s chief design editor.

Indeed, such a word as “padding” immediately raises its own counter-question: Wherein can a government do anything to address such a problem? In other words, relevance is the question which journalism raises again and again all over the world, especially in Kenya and other Third World countries.

What the daily newspapers in such countries carry, especially on their foreign news pages, is often absolutely appalling by its irrelevance unsuitability to the consuming societies. Of course, a newspaper can often make an internal attempt to rewrite the wire stories to remove the Western self-interests and prejudices written in them.

WIRE STORIES

Many decades ago, I worked for a system in Dar es Salaam more conscious of the Western self-interests usually written into the wire stories reaching us from the Western news agencies. As a matter of policy, we tried to editorially remove the Western self-interests written all over them concerning such Western controlled southern African countries as Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and Southern Rhodesia.

But the agencies often complained bitterly that we were distorting what they had sold to us so “expensively” whenever we edited out of their stories what, in our opinion, had been Western prejudices and self-interests. Our practice was to try to remove from those stories all of the self-interests of the upper-classes of the Western European and North American states.

Many stories from the Western wire agencies are written without even an attempt to cover the self-interests of the ruling systems of the countries in a which a wire company was based.

The writer is a veteran journalist; [email protected]