My Media Roundtable: Media and Political Violence

Kenya, we are not only a political country where everyone from the mama mboga on the street to the CEO is actively engaged in discussions on politics. We are also voracious consumers of news media, its not unusual to see a group of people huddled round a radio, or over a newspaper listening to or reading the news while simultaneously debating eruditely salient points of politics.

To different extents we all rely on some form of media for information on what is going on in our country, with our parliamentarians and other leaders. Through its actions i.e. what and how it airs a story or what goes to press, the media paints a picture of the Kenya in which we live and many times has the capacity to influence our perceptions of political events, and impact our political decisions.

However despite the effect of the media on our collective political conscientiousness there are limited avenues for the public to engage with the media fraternity. And this is what makes the media roundtable such an interesting space. The media roundtable is a public forum, hosted by Media Focus on Africa, every last Tuesday of the month where the public engage with members of media to discuss the role of the media on various issues. The topic of the roundtable held this Tuesday was Media and Political Violence. The question central to the discussion was the extent to which the media contributed to the 2007/2008 post election violence and what be done to the improve reporting in the coming election? Several issues came up:

• Does the media’s focus on politics, and the way it reports on politics serve to heighten the tensions that surround political issues and political leadership?
• Has the media’s reporting on political events changed since the 2007/2008?
• Is the media overly focussed on politics to the detriment of stories on development?
• Is the media is overly focussed on issues of ethnicity in its reporting?
• The effect media ownership and vested interests and resultant bias in political reporting, and its role in heightening tension
• Should the media focus less on the voices of politicians and more on the voice of the everyday wananchi?

In making the point that there is need for the media to focus more on the voices of ordinary Kenyans as opposed to politicians one participant remarked that media reporting had served to make an election about the collective lives of 40 million+ Kenyans a narrative of 4 political personalities.

While the country’s media is far from perfect; and there is no doubt that media, particularly vernacular stations, played part in stoking tensions that lead to the 2007/2008-post election violence.  The extent to which the media contributed to political polarization and the ensuing post election violence in 2007/2008 is difficult to determine. Media reporting aside, Kenyan politics has been and polarised for a very long time, various political players have encouraged and used this polarization to their political advantage.

The media has played a crucial part in the reforms since 2008 and continues to play an important role in uncovering the reality to political events and developments that would otherwise be obscured. Making a decision on what news to report and how to report it is remains a matter of balancing the tension between reporting the reality of political events as they unfold and the possible unintended consequences that such political reporting may have in sensitive times i.e. in encouraging polarization, exacerbating tension or escalating violence. For all its faults the Kenyan media remains a critical reflection of our society and its politics and the usefulness of the media in providing crucial insight in the political dynamics cannot be discounted.

How would you rate the media’s political coverage?

Posted by Mzalendo Editor on Feb. 3, 2012

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