The Kenyan Fourth Estate: Role in Election

Kenya has in recent years had its media wake up to a realization that its professionalism was devoid, as any sweet voiced or good looking nobody could be a journalist.

Then came 2007, a turning point for almost everything in Kenya including realization of the need to ensure ethical and responsible journalism as journalist allegedly treated their role ‘irresponsibly’.

The Media Council of Kenya came alive in earnest robustness radically calling for all journalists to be accredited by it on grounds of academics and practice. Journalists are now thanks to them able to be cut out as professionals. During the elections only journalists with badges accented by IEBC were allowed near polling stations or tallying centres. And with such levels of accreditation plus the IEBC badges, we still could not trust journalists to provide the nation with poll figures. Instead it was decreed that only the results tallied from IEBC were supposed to be relayed. Journalists too scared to treat this times election ‘irresponsibly’ kept off too.

I doubt that it was beneficial as it would have proved important to have different tallies by more than just IEBC, e.g. the tallies carried out by Nation Media Group as referrals that would in effect help reconcile variances. Leaving IEBC to be the sole source of primary data inspired by the politics of fear or ‘peace’ as was our case leaves a lot to be desired about journalistic role in the election.

It makes void the point of accreditation if journalists cannot be trusted to do their work or would not do it for fear of being blamed. Hitherto irresponsible-unprofessional journalism has not been annihilated by badges and accreditation if we cannot trust journalist to announce results from the ground in real time.

Thus what would purge this profession of doubts and win back public trust that would allow us, as journalists do our work without being subjected to unwarranted restraint on the obvious. Surely I do not think packing our tabloids with expert analysis from non-journalist consultants is the solution.

If Media council of Kenya can strengthen curriculum of journalism schools encourage specialization in different discipline and have media houses reinforce this differentiation then we can have not just paper professionalism but practical as well.

We can build brands around disciplines of sciences, politics, health, social issues, finance etc and have media practitioners who we know have true command of their fields. Then we can trust them with the truth and its analytics.

I believe if we strongly had journalists who we could trust with political issues we would allow them to tell the story as it was instead of playing to the public gallery of peace. We could trust them with tallying just as a way of reconciling variances.

If our journalism is to rise above mediocrity then we should have the fourth estate realize they are not observers but key players in the business of running this country.