Following the difficult political standoff in late December 2007 where President Mwai Kibaki was declared reelected after a campaign marred by fraud, Kenyan editors and journalists were faced with a dilemma: should their role be neutral, interrogative, or critical amid a political climate close to exploding?

Now as the situation has been quieted, several international organisations, chiefly ARTICLE 19, International Media Support (IMS) and Reporters Without Borders (RSF), recently led a mission to Kenya to identify the options that were open to the media and the role they in fact played. Their findings belied the stereotype of the African media as a cause of violence and illustrated how that stereotype limited journalists’ actions because of the fear of fulfilling it. Also further identified were the government curbs on press freedom, apparently not completely removed from the country. Kenya had previously enjoyed a freer press than most other African nations.

The media, as laid down in the report, did not exacerbate the political crisis, nor did it incite violence as previously suggested in other sources. Rather newspaper headlines and broadcasts that managed to seep through the media ban, which was in place between 30 December 2007 and 4 February 2008, were more messages of peace under the wide-spread slogan “peace above all.” However, the report’s findings contended “the risk they [the media] took in doing this was to fail in their duty to report the facts, present them to those involved in the events and let the public judge the result.”

In the end, the extent to which they fulfilled their assumed role, it was found, was extremely limited as the country’s journalists found themselves unequipped to report on such a crisis and, thus, more often fell victim to the government and even more so, to the limitations of themselves and media institutions.

Though Frank Ojiambo of the Editor’s Guild of Kenya said, “No media house told us what happened. No media house in Kenya stood up and said: this is how things are...the profession is seriously corrupt.”

At the start of the blackout, journalists were forced out of the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) headquarters during a press conference where the opposition leader Raila Odinga denounced his opponent’s victory as fraudulent. Later that day, as reported by Kwendo Opanga, editorial director of the Standard Group and one of the country’s most prominent journalists, the information ministry declared a “suspension” or in the words of the government, a “short delay” of live coverage in the interest of “security and public order.”

Radio stations, and especially those which broadcast in local languages, were particularly monitored, as the government feared they would be used as instruments for ethnic stirring (due in part to the ever-present memory of Radio-télévision libre des milles collines (RTLM) during the 1994 Rwandan genocide). Managing director of the Royal Media Services group (the umbrella group of Citizen Television and a dozen vernacular radio stations), Wachira Waruru informed the international organisations behind the report that there had indeed been a few problems (in Western Kenya), however they were quickly dealt with and speakers who had pushed the limits were taken off the air.

Others, like David Ward, the EU observer mission member who oversaw the media, pinpointed the bulk of the flawed reporting in the heavily biased government media such as the TV station KBC.

Through speaking to journalists in Kenya, the report’s researchers found that journalists were often constrained by their own fear of perhaps inciting violence and deeper ethnic divisions through coverage. Others suggested that the media imploded on itself, unable to fulfill its “mission as watchdogs of democracy.” Opanga said to the mission, “journalists had not pushed to find out the truth after it was clear the results were rigged.” Many believe that is the main role they should have filled, even in the face of government constraints, institutional shortcomings, and the overall polluted climate they were plunged into.

The Nairobi Round Table, carried out by the Editors’ Guild of Kenya and Kenyan Union of Journalists, convened on 12 February to address the problems facing the media.

At the round table the forty participants representing all the major media organisations in the country identified a series of challenges that hindered journalists before and after the election period.

Identified challenges included: trauma from witnessing violence, safety of journalists, unawareness of conflict sensitive journalism, a general climate of fear, inadequate professional training, corruption at all levels in the media, constitutional and legal framework that constrains freedom of expression, and overall weak media institutions in regards to finance, membership and organisation.

In response, participants at the round table fashioned a comprehensive list of recommendations to serve as a basis for ensuring a better-equipped and stable media as the country enters a new period.

Anne Poulsen, consultant with IMS, informed RAP 21 that efforts are continuing as IMS has organized safety training for sixty media professionals in three regions and a workshop on conflict sensitive journalism for another twenty-five people in the media in Nairobi in February. IMS is also supporting the three Kenyan journalist unions/associations carry out trauma counseling for the country’s 150 most vulnerable media professionals after having covered the conflict.

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