Does media give rich more coverage?

A section of MPs during the first sitting of the 11th Parliament on March 28. Parliament and the Information and Communications Ministry have asked the media to cease hostilities over the passage of a draconian Bill. Photo/FILE  NATION MEDIA GROUP

By Margaretta wa Gacheru

The contrast between the media’s treatment of the Mutindwa tragedy and that of the Westgate attack is stunning. We are still talking about the terrorists, the loss of life and the looting of properties at the Mall, yet the assault on the Westgate happened more than a month ago.

It took less than 24 hours for news about the fatal crash at Mutindwa to come off the front pages of the local press. News that no less than a dozen people died, and many more suffered severe injuries, barely made a ripple in the international media.

The response from the public was cynical yet realistic: “It’s because Mutindwa is on the other side of town.” It was a startling summary of a fundamental reality in Kenyan society today, which is that the well-to-do tend to receive far more media attention than ordinary Kenyans do.

And in fact, the Al-Shabaab terrorists were well aware of which way to get a high-profile media coverage of their apparent power and terrorising capacity. Just hit a place that’s popular, not with ordinary Kenyans but with ‘prominent’ people whose pain will be felt from London to Beijing to Paris and Washington DC.

Yet the pain of so-called ordinary Kenyans is palpable to those who lost loved ones in the careless crash that some may say was ‘an accident waiting to happen’, but which was an event that could have been prevented.

Pain

It could have been prevented if traffic rules were enforced and traffic cops commanded more authority or not assumed to be corrupt.

It’s especially painful for the families (like mine) who lost loved ones so unnecessarily. Some of us believe what happened at Mutindwa should also be treated like a massacre—not an accident, since there was nothing inevitable about what happened October 30th at 7am.

Neither the politicians nor the media have rallied around the survivors of the Mutindwa ‘massacre’. None have offered to fund raise for the families who lost their loved ones, despite the fact that those families feel the pain of loss just as deeply as those who lost loved ones in the Westgate terrorist attack. No trauma units have been set up.

Is it because we have all become so cynical as to believe that some people are more important than others?

Or is it because we are far too complacent about the issue of corruption and don’t really want to root it out since that would mean rocking the boat, transforming the status quo and curtailing the vested interests who care about short-term gains rather than the long term goal of ensuring Kenya is cleansed of corrupt politicians as well as ordinary get-rich-quick hustlers whose wheeler-dealing is hazardous to the public’s health, happiness and human life.