Press risks sacrificing its neutrality

Following the release of the draft Constitution and the recent Cabinet retreat in Mombasa, the reform agenda is back in the news.

The draft is now to be debated over the next one month.

There are however legitimate fears that instead of a public debate, this debate will be managed by a select few.

Constitution making is a complex process and Kenya’s has been particularly difficult, a process made even more vexing because it is constantly scuttled by sections of an anxious political elite.

Enemy of change

This class remains the enemy of change, because any change threatens their very existence.

But blame must also be stretched to the news media, particularly its coverage of this now drawn-out process.

Admittedly, Kenya’s news media has played a significant role in sustaining a discourse of political reform in the country.

Even then, its coverage of the reform agenda now raises a number of questions.

The biggest question relates to this news media’s notion of news values.

One of the most important news values in the news making process is the idea of clarity.

A news story should not be ambiguous otherwise it fails to effectively communicate its intentions.

But there is an in-built weakness to this concept.

In the pursuit of unequivocality, complex stories are deliberately simplified by news organisations to ensure that what is encoded is what the reader decodes, disregarding the fact that for any text, there are usually three possible readings.

This often leads to, for instance, the negation of context and to the deliberate avoidance of nuance.