Today for the many long-suffering journalists who for various reasons cannot fight their own battles.
I woke up one day to a social media storm. Robert Alai, my choice for Kileleshwa MCA, had falsely tweeted that then-Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i had bought a car for me.
Only that he didn’t quite say it: He just scattered hints and broad suggestions to guide the mind to that conclusion.
He is a thug, a good propagandist.
I am quite vain—God help me—about my reputation and honesty and also very unreasonable about unfairness. I can never let it pass. Like most journalists, I hate publicity and I distrust those who seek it.
It took a massive effort of will to sit calmly and do nothing about it. I had to keep telling myself that I am not the story; my job is to report. In any case, an editor can never sue for defamation, I believe.
Credibility attack
What Alai, and many of his blogger friends like Dennis Itumbi, are involved in is called a credibility attack, which is a political strategy to defang the truth on behalf of wrongdoers. These attackers have virtually weaponised social media against the press in many countries around the world.
It is possible that some of these bloggers believe they are righteously taking down an arrogant twerp of an editor a rung or two but, in their ‘righteousness’, they leave themselves open to manipulation by clever, powerful people.
Others seek revenge for any number of things they think a journalist has done to them. Alai, I’m told, loathes me because of some story about him he claims I killed in the Sunday Nation in 1263 BC.
I will concede that some bloggers have a quixotic need to expose hypocrisy in the mighty and, perhaps, a genuine desire to be advocates for the little buy. But they mostly hound us for the rush of power it gives them, the favour it wins them among the mighty and the kickbacks it brings.
Social media has besieged institutional media by falsely claiming that formal media is corrupt, captured by the power elite, timid and elitist and that bloggers are truth-tellers who do it for the truth and the small guy.
Institutional media, hobbled by the rules, and journalists worried about damaging their reputation further by giving social media allegations ‘legs’, have left the goal wide open. And they have suffered for it.
Good professionals
Kenyan journalists are not as corrupt, incompetent and feckless as painted by bloggers. Some are eating bribes, I know, but the large majority are good professionals and victims of a whole lot of things.
For me, I am amused to no end by how the tables have turned. I am back in the street—for now—only bound by my own morality and the professional code by which I have lived. I can do as I please and I can blog with the best; I can run with the hares and eat with the hounds.
Have teeth, can finally bite back.
The difference between old-school, hard-bitten, shoe-leather journalists like us and bloggers is that, although our bottoms have grown soft from driving a desk, we are still very good, disciplined and driven reporters with vast networks of sources. If we go for a story, it is told.
On the other hand, Alai is an MCA with a soft underbelly and legs of clay. Itumbi is telling lies in State House, apparently angling for a job from the “mboss”. I don’t give a hoot what anybody writes about me. I wouldn’t even read it; my heart is scarified from a lifetime of attacks.
Not that I would go after these folks; I forgave and moved on. I am just making the point that they have soiled the reputation of Kenyan journalism unfairly and that, at some time, we will get organised and do something about it.
The second group of people that has hurt our profession is the “give-me-a-million-to-go-and-deal-with-it” battalion of jobbers, nincompoops and ne’er-do-wells which populates a small section of the PR world.
The broad mass of PR folks are good people, doing a decent job of marketing their clients. But there is a small group which promises that it can “solve” bad publicity even when it is straight reporting of their client’s criminal conduct.
So, a con man who has never met Editor X picks the money and goes home to a good dinner, and the story receives wide coverage.
Then the following day he goes back to the client with an angry story: “It is that arrogant Meru Editor X. He just hates Njemps. Give me a million and I’ll go and see Editor Y. In fact, he has already agreed to help us; he loves Njemps, and he will give us an apology and end this nonsense.”
And the clueless crook hastily hands over the envelope. One day, the tables will turn.
Please, be nice to journalists.
