Media coverage tone
What Kenya’s newsrooms are covering, and in what tone — strikes, the cost of living and sport alongside Bills and MPs, from a fixed allowlist of Kenyan outlets. Use Subject below to narrow it to Parliament only. See exactly how it works.
Tone says whether coverage was good or bad. This says what the feeling is — and those come apart where it matters: anger and fear are both negative, but a country that is frightened is in a different place from one that is furious.
Strongest reading: Anger at 44%. Measured over 253 scored items, with 2 items in this view not yet scored for emotion and left out of the averages rather than counted as zero.
What the National Assembly is working on — for each Bill: its current
stage, how media is covering it, and what
citizens have submitted. These are three separate readings,
never blended into one score.
Parliamentary activity as of the last recorded
order paper (sitting): 13 Aug 2026 — this can lag by a
few weeks, and Parliament may be in recess.
Everything below measures the tone of media coverage of Parliament across all topics — background context for the Bills above. It is not public opinion and not a poll.
Topics ranked by current coverage volume × how far their tone moved against the trailing four-bucket baseline (weekly buckets where the week has 5+ reviewed items, else monthly). A topic only ranks when both windows clear 5 items.
Each column is one month of reviewed coverage, split by tone. A month with fewer than 5 reviewed items is left out entirely, so the months shown need not be next to each other in time. That is why the columns are deliberately not joined up: a line drawn between them would invent a trend across the gap.
Topics ranked by how many reviewed items mention them. One item can mention several, so these do not sum to the item count.
Bar length is how many items mentioned it. The colour is the average tone, shown only where there are at least 5 items — a shorter bar is a smaller sample, not a quieter mood.
A single item can mention several topics, so these mentions sum to more than the 255 items analysed. Topics under 5 mentions show no average.
| Topic | Mentions (n) | Average tone |
|---|---|---|
| Devolution | 510 | -0.21 (n = 510) |
| Governance & Constitution | 287 | -0.21 (n = 287) |
| Security | 255 | -0.37 (n = 255) |
| Education | 208 | -0.19 (n = 208) |
| Healthcare | 205 | -0.20 (n = 205) |
| Economy & Taxation | 165 | -0.30 (n = 165) |
| Corruption & Accountability | 100 | -0.47 (n = 100) |
| Agriculture | 77 | 0.02 (n = 77) |
Every source here is on the allowlist published in the methodology.
Bar length is how many items mentioned it. The colour is the average tone, shown only where there are at least 5 items — a shorter bar is a smaller sample, not a quieter mood.
| Source | Items (n) | Average tone |
|---|---|---|
| The Standard | 1039 | -0.23 (n = 1039) |
| People Daily | 193 | -0.09 (n = 193) |
| Citizen Digital | 157 | -0.08 (n = 157) |
| Nation | 14 | -0.38 (n = 14) |
| The Star | 1 | too few (n = 1) |
Every figure on this page is built from items like these — each linked to its source.
This page tracks the tone of media coverage — it is NOT a statistical opinion poll and never measures public opinion or approval. What the public itself is saying is a separate lane, on its own page: What Kenyans are saying. The pipeline here: articles from a fixed allowlist of Kenyan outlets (Nation, The Standard, The Star, People Daily, Citizen Digital, NTV Kenya, K24 Digital, KBC, Capital FM, Business Daily, The EastAfrican and Taifa Leo) are ingested every few hours; a classifier first scores each item’s relevance to the Parliament of Kenya, and items below the relevance floor are rejected outright.
Surviving items are classified positive / neutral / negative (with a −1.0 to +1.0 score) by an AI language model; confident calls publish, borderline ones wait in a human review queue. Items are then linked to the members and Bills they name, with uncertain links held for editor review. No average is shown from fewer than 5 reviewed items, every average is printed with its sample size, and every figure traces to the listed items with source, link and date. Full details: methodology.