Africa is hot, dusty, corrupt, dangerous and backward. This is how the international press portrays it.
This
is false. Among the most amazing jewels of the world are Eldoret’s
wonderful weather, Uplands' and Kericho’s fertile lands, the astounding
Mara scenery viewed from Kichwa Tembo, and the crystalline Diani, Kisite or Watamu beaches. The list is long. Africa is as diverse as its countries and its peoples.
International
press agencies have little interest in this diversity. They insist:
Hot, dusty, corrupt, dangerous and backward, and now, in Kenya, “at
war”. The reason is simple: Good news doesn’t sell.
Press
agencies tend to generalise, fast-track, package and sell. They have no
time to go deep. They do fast-news, just like McDonalds’ fast-food,
which was a great invention for the hasty, moving people in a spinning
world to have their meal of choice ready within five minutes.
Fast-news
has its pros and cons, very much as McDonald's hamburgers do. You save
time but compromise health. You may pay dearly tomorrow for the minutes
you saved today. I love yank and fast-food, but I can’t eat it everyday.
The same happens with fast-news. We must go deeper and that’s where news analysis and contextualization comes in.
The
“big four” press agencies in the world are: United Press International,
Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse. They provide over
90 per cent of foreign news printed by the world’s newspapers. They are
by and large accurate, but not contextualized.
They generalise about peoples’ habits, customs, ways of being and events. They use few words, and each word means many things.
They
compromise on quality and depth for the sake of speed and quantity.
They have to satiate the never-ending thirst of a modern world that
cares little about wisdom. Fast-news must be quick, short, simple, here
and now.
Just like McDonald’s, press agencies have one
set menu, where shooting, murder, poverty, thirst or hunger are taken
literally, without a context. For them a shooting incident in Mpeketoni
or Mandera is the same as a shooting happening in Harambee House or in
Parliament. A grenade thrown at a church in Isiolo is the same as a
grenade at the airport.
Certainly, they are all crimes,
and they must be prosecuted and punished. But not all crimes are equal,
for they are also measured in relation to the offended party. An insult
to a person in the street may be misdemeanour, but an insult to the
President could be treason.
"I HEAR KENYA IS A WAR-ZONE"
In
Africa, and specifically in Kenya, this lack of contextualization is
causing devastating effects. Africa is just a cooking pot. It is always
hot, on fire, boiling. Only the handle, South Africa, can be touched.
We
shouldn’t overlook the fact that there are serious problems that need
urgent attention. But, the way in which the international press has been
informing about Kenya does not reflect the reality on the ground.
Things are blown out of proportion and this is precisely causing the
unwanted effect.
We can’t entirely blame the
international agencies for what they do. In the end we pay them for what
they do. We support them, we believe in them, we swallow their output
as bible-truth, line, hook and sinker.
In the last
three weeks I have got a good number of international phone calls and
emails. They ask: "I hear Kenya is a war-zone, are you ok? Should I
cancel my trip? Can you provide me with police escort?"
This is not new. I remember getting similar calls during the 1994 Rwanda genocide. They asked if Nairobi was safe.
This
fast-news made out of unprocessed and out of context statements is
causing great damage to the country. News should not be filtered, and
the government should not tamper with the right to freedom of speech and
expression. But this should be a call to every foreign correspondent in
Nairobi to make greater efforts to contextualize news items, to
practice responsible journalism.
It is unethical to
give relevance to irresponsible statements from unverifiable sources.
Twitter is not a verifiable source, so not all tweets should find their
way into the newsroom. Let us not blow things out of proportion, or else
we will be causing irreparable damage to an innocent society.
I still ask myself, whose war are we fighting? I’ve not found an answer. But the world out there thinks we are at war.
This
is the product of fast-news; of generalisations that are often unfair
and, at best, inaccurate. Actually, I would dare say, quoting Mark
Twain, that “all generalisations are false, including this one.”
Dr Franceschi is the Dean of Strathmore Law School. Lfranceschi@strathmore.edu Twitter: @lgfranceschi
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