I like to view myself as a bumptious journalist.
For in a war of ideas, journalists move from being mere observers to participants in any society.
I have always believed that nothing matters most in the business
than the pursuit of truth for it is at the heart of good journalism.
You may or may not agree with my view that facts are the necessary foundation for human decision making and human progress in the policies of governance, discoveries of science, lives of individuals, societies and nations.
I have grown up in the field believing that
no matter what journalists cover, many of them hold people and institutions responsible for their words and actions.
It now more important than ever that journalists and the public realize that popular acclaim for clicks is not a measure of success in the era of social media but rigorous standards of depth and accuracy in storytelling.
Democracy
Just the other day after one of the most
hotly contested political contests, the Kenyan government shutdown three of the largest television stations in the country.
The neanderthal decision to do so took to effect just after a memorandum from the then chair of the Editor’s Guild Kenya, Linus Kaikai revealing that all senior editors in the country had been summoned by the president and deputy president among other officials and told that if they covered the parallel mock inauguration ceremony called by Raila Odinga and NASA coalition, they would be punished.
This is what the post-truth era in Kenya might just look like if we don’t defend journalism and ensure it never happens again.
An era which evidence, critical thinking and analysis are pushed aside in favour of emotion and intuition as basis for judgment and action.
It also saddens me that our Media Council
, other stakeholders like the Media Owners Association and the Editors ' Guilt ' itself resorted to hiding behind the legend that is
Okiya Okoiti Omtatah
instead of nipping it all
in the bud .
Have we learned anything?
As journalists we have a mandate to defend democracy at all costs. Telling truth to power and systems that are hell-bent on weakening truth producing infrastructures such as the fourth estate should be our top priority.
Untruth
We are in all our media, a nation screaming past each other because
one of the news values that draws everyone to journalism is conflict.
Thanks to social media, the ease in which a tweeted untruth can dominate a news cycle for days is new given the disruption we are experiencing in journalism. It comes at a time when lightening is the only acceptable speed for which posting a politician’s outburst or tactical dumb foolery for example let alone a sitting president’s, is regarded as ‘breaking news ‘of some sort.
It is high time we educate not only ourselves but the public to apply news judgment in that tiny moment they decide to retweet or like a tweet rather than serve as accomplices to destructive claims and fake news that end up violating our democracy.
After all the
technological effect , the real news and analysis is what matters the most for at the end of the day people need to understand what is happening then try to
understand
the
real issues
in effort to know what might happen in the future .
Business –models
We need to look at the very basis of our system in which journalism operates in and not just try to find business models that work because we all agree that good journalism is very expensive and someone has to pay for it.
The environment and pool in which our journalism is operating is no longer fit for purpose.
However much we try to rebrand a thousand times ,set up new political talk shows because Kenyans have a hard-on for politics
, hire new
' curvy
' people who look like they just took a bath
in a fountain of make-up
mixed with camel milk before showing up for work
and even ship them to studios calling them
VIPs using
lines like ‘ going beyond the news ’ on
promos
, it won’t really deliver good journalism
and for a fact won’t help our democracy .
We
journalists are now far more mobile, dealing with a much sharper audience that probably knows the news before you ran on air with it .
We change jobs very often and digital spheres are now ubiquitous in this situation where flexibility is required, uncertainty abounds and trust in truthful journalism is needed now more than ever.
As we strive to
play around with
the idea of
going fully digital, pay walls
among other
subscription models so as to fund good journalism
and make a killing online ,always remember that journalism is a fundamentally human construct and we out to teach consumers to have a responsibility to look for news sources based on quality journalism.
Transition
In journalism 101, we are taught fundamental tennets like... be accurate …be fair…don’t make yourself the story.
My question to you who are determined to frustrate and violate good journalism remains, is it not in order for a media house to be a voice to the voiceless?
Tell essential truth?
Hold truth to power?
The fact that in Kenya we seem to
rarely cover stories on income inequality for example
with the depth and seriousness
it requires because
our revenue models largely rely on government and corporate
advertising
is very unfortunate .
What are we doing to change this?
Are we honestly a free media?
I challenge every media house to declare publicly its threshold for moral outrage as we head into 2019.
Media
encourages diversity in opinion and this is good.
We are in a period of very dynamic transition, nobody can honestly say what the world of journalism and media is going to look like in the near future and anyone who tells you that they’ve got a clear sense of what it might be is lying.
As a student and researcher however this is what I know and can assure you. It is all going to settle and stabilize into some form of dynamics.
If we simply allow it to unfold to some kind of direction, we will end up with a counter-productive result and possibly destructive to our democracy. We as journalists therefore need to take tight leadership and really decide what it is that we need journalism to do and make sure we design a system that delivers that outcome.
( Leon Lidigu is a student of Journalism at Pacific University , India )