All criticism of the Executive must be based on real facts

Residents of Ol Kalou, Nyandarua County, discuss stories published in the Daily Nation on August 15, 2017. Media must base all their criticisms on fully objective facts and figures. PHOTO | JOHN GITHINJI | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Criticism is useful only if offered with mutual respect in a manner that helps all sides to contribute to the maximum to achieving their country’s objectives.
  • What many of us in the media do not appreciate is that freedom to criticise always implies freedom to praise.

The print media are not Africa’s traditional means of public information.

Only recently have we borrowed them from our European colonisers.

That is one reason all our newspapers ought to play the leading role in the proper use of the European language, which we have chosen as our means of public information and classroom upbringing.

In grammar, the Nation usually does better than its competitor.

DICTUM

Yet, even there, what we often find is often uninspiring. Page six of the January 30 number included language that did not convince me that even the group in which I grew up as a newspaperman is fully aware of that dictum.

On that page, I picked up the following opal: “The Guild reminded the President that the media is a messenger in the unfolding political events…”

A media house ought to be the first to know that media is a plural noun and that medium is the singular form of that Latin word.

If, then, media is a plural word, why does Kenya’s Press force it to take the singular verb form “is”?

Moreover, in what way had their journalistic excellencies known how the President had reacted to that story?

STATE HOUSE
As the chief sub-editor, you should never accept a story in that form unless you know that the reporter has taken the trouble to affirm certain vital facts and figures concerning the President’s activities.

I know it because occasional failure by my own system (when I edited a ruling party newspaper) often caused me no end of grief from a State House at that time occupied by no less a personage called Daniel arap Moi, whose “excellency” was clear to all the “yes-men” and “yes-women” who scurried like rats whenever the President merely cleared his throat.

The person’s excellency seemed clear to us all. It wouldn’t have occurred to us that we were abusing the term “His Excellency”, though Kenya’s media had abused it ever since Sir Philip Mitchell, one of Britain’s colonial governors of post-war Kenya, by allowing the President to act as the chief judge and policeman over how a newspapers should run.

INDEPENDENCE
In that way, all of Kenya’s newspapers (including those which described themselves as “independent”) had tied their own professional hands completely.

I do not urge the media to be rude to the President.

Needed is a situation in which both sides can freely criticise each other, in such a manner, however, that criticism is not malicious but succeeds only in serving to inspire objective knowledge and enthusiasm in the nation’s best interests.

Criticism is useful only if offered with mutual respect in a manner that helps all sides to contribute to the maximum to achieving their country’s objectives.

CRITICISM

What many of us in the media do not appreciate is that freedom to criticise always implies freedom to praise.

Our training institutions ought to ask themselves the question: Why aren’t our editorial writers as quick with congratulations as they are with damnations?

If improvement is your aim, then mightn’t congratulations inspire it much sooner than damnation.

Why is it that President Uhuru Kenyatta never seems to do anything that inspires a newspaper’s full-hearted editorial praise?

PRAISE

Where all the commentary columns of a newspaper are full of scathing attacks on the official society — and where there is not a single word of commendation (even when praise is what is called for) — there, the media have created such a lopsided situation in the readers’ minds as to make even the rare praise sound like cynical laughter.

Freedom of criticism is essential in all human societies because it is the only way in which the leaders — if they are serious — can measure whether their activities are succeeding in leading the people to their objective national desires.

That is why the media must base all their criticisms on fully objective facts and figures.