How about blacking out the chatterboxes?

By PHILIP OCHIENG
Posted  Saturday, April 2 2011 at 17:54

I was excited when I saw a collective statement by our media owners recently warning the government about the precipice towards which politics is taking this country.

I had never expected such a collective statement from those worthies because (a) as individuals, they rightfully support different parties and (b) as business people, they are cut-throat competitors.

The collective warning means that, although it has taken them agonisingly long to recognise it, they have a certain community of interests which is a hundred times more important to them than their several political leanings and their conflicting commercial pursuits.

It is that you cannot make any money in a situation of habitual chaos and bloodshed.

If so, then the media owners and their managers and editors have something else to publicly confess.

It is that their own newspapers and radio and television stations are the principal — nay, the only — vectors of the tempestuous winds – the political tornadoes, typhoons and tsunamis – which now threaten to plunge Kenya into an imbroglio of blood.

As a former central insider, I know the dilemma. I know why the dailies have a fixation with the politician almost to the complete neglect of the farmer, the transporter, the parent, the teacher, the university lecturer, the road builder and others whose work is a million times more important to this nation’s health and wealth than the politician’s diarrhoea of words.

It is that the media are commercial ventures. Apart from advertisements, headlines are their stock-in-trade. And the politicians have the knack for producing the most sensation-tingling headlines.

But the media owners cannot have their cake and eat it too. Yes, this is a capitalist country. Let the media owners make their money.

But let them realise this. In time, the headline-grabbing words which the politicians utter – the shameless lie, the false witness against the rival, the ethnic hate-speech – none of these is, even by intention, made on Kenya’s behalf.

All have only two purposes. One is to aggrandise the individual’s image and promote his political ambition.

Once the individual is inside – as an MP or a minister – the words are designed to protect him against any accusation of the massive corruption which, in Kenya, seems to be the only motivation for entering the political arena.

Radically evil words are intended also to manipulate the ethnic mass mind and turn it against the rivalling ambitions in the other big ethnic communities.

The headline is racy and the newspaper goes like hot cake. But, at exactly the same time, the headline raises tempers among rivals, among ethnic groups, even among people like myself (who have no personal interests in these mindless power plays).

Meantime, the tempers are deepened both by the intensification of looting and by the apparent tribe-based accusations and counter-accusations about who is who among the looters, accusations and counter-accusations which also, apparently of necessity, take ethnic lines – and by the apparent official refusal to do anything about the rot.

It is a vicious circle. Because the media are mesmerised by the politicians, every politician knows that any outrageous statement he makes — no matter how irresponsible, how reckless, how provocative, how mindless — will be the subject of a banner headline in tomorrow’s newspapers. That is what makes the politician tick.

But it, and the banner headline are also what are so rapidly pushing this country into an ethnic Armageddon from which Kenya may never again emerge to even to pretend to be working towards nationhood. The media simply have to choose.

Like America’s corporate industrialists, who make money by ruining the very planet on which alone they can make money, do our media want to go on making money by selling sensational nonsense which is sure to ruin their own long-term money-making marketplace?

Wouldn’t it be more profitable to sacrifice some of the profit in the short run in order to make the political market safer for longer-run profit-making?

I do not think media owners would be offending any tenet of media freedom if, in the nation’s deeper interests, they agreed to black out all the chatterboxes from their pages and screens.