Yes, journalists are under siege of powerful forces, but......

Journalists in Nairobi Mombasa have within the last one month held demonstrations over what they claim to be the diminishing space of their operational environment. They have argued that they are undergoing threats, intimidation, and harassment, trolling and a tapping of their phones by people whom they claimed to be allied to Government.

The journalists particularly in Mombasa documented cases in which their colleagues either died under mysterious circumstances or suffered in one way or another at the hand of powerful. They created hush tag #Journalistsundersiege to make a case for their grievances.

Looking at it deeply, you realize that the journalists are more than justified to express their rage. They are justified to vent their frustrations, express their fears and even draw the eye of power towards the increasing number of cases of threats, harassment and intimidation some of which have been at the hands of security agents. They are justified to express their frustrations over the inability to tell the story as it is without any frontiers on behalf of the majority.

That said, the media has moral and legal responsibility to tell the story regardless of affiliations for the good of the society.

In conversations held with colleagues, it emerged that while it is true that journalists are under siege of powerful forces, they are under siege of compromise. The siege that took the journalists to the streets is more physical; its harm can be seen and accounted for. Under compromise, the damage is not explicit but is interwoven into the system thus affecting effective functional roles of the media.

Take for instance the widely known but rarely talked about brown envelope journalism. The giver of the envelope puts the journalist under siege and therefore they cannot be free to report the way things have happened. Brown envelope silences the journalist; it creates a gate in which the journalist sees the story from the eyes of the news-maker thus denying audiences and readers a chance to get the whole picture.

There are widely circulated but unverified claims that some journalists in Mombasa have had their education fully or partially funded by politicians. The import of this is that the journalists cease to be members of the fourth estate and instead become sycophantic praise of their funders. They are basically under siege, and not for a specific period of time but for a lifetime.

Add this to the emergence of powerful public relations whose intentions are still in line with the founders of the profession – to contain the effects of muckrakers. Public relations and reputation management has always had money and therefore willing to go any length to spend and ensure that the reputation and profiles of the subjects remains in top form.  On the other hand, a good number of journalists are famished. Some earn peanuts and while others have not been paid for quite a while. So whenever they meet with deep pockets, they are always ready to sing to their bid.

There are claims that the same journalists put their colleagues under the siege of compromises. A compromised individual would do anything to ensure that they guard their compromise and therefore they will sell out their colleagues thus jeopardizing their lives. Further, compromised journalists tinker with politicians and the end result is that they also end up taking political positions and acting as gatekeepers of the political class both in the newsroom and in the field. They will watch out who is filing which negative story against those who fund them. They will take recordings of functions to their funders and at the end of the day, the trade becomes muddled in siege.

It is probably a time that journalists need to start having a conversation with their employers, The Media Council of Kenya and the representative associations on how they can conduct their work independently and without frontiers. My only concern is that a free and independent media never existed anywhere as the pressures are more than those that took journalists to the streets.

Ends…….