Media Council of Kenya (MCK) now says the decision to suspend live streaming of the August 9 presidential election results was arrived at after media houses displayed different results.

MCK said varying results caused unnecessary anxiety among Kenyans.

“The decision to suspend display of the results was made by media stakeholders when they felt that the numbers displayed by different media houses were bringing unnecessary anxiety and was not occasioned by external pressure,” MCK said on Tuesday, August 23, after releasing media assessment report on the election.

The media monitoring body, however, said the results that were being displayed were accurate because they were picked from the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) online portal.

“All the results displayed by media houses were accurate and only sourced from the IEBC portal.

“However, because different media houses started counting at different times, others counted in descending order, others in alphabetical order, while some media houses employed more personnel than others and results displayed at any one time were not the same,” MCK CEO David Omwoyo said.

MCK on joint tallying of presidential election results

MCK further explained why the media houses did not organise a joint tallying of presidential election results.

“While MCK, and in fact both the Media Owners and Editors Guild, agreed in principle that a joint approach and synchronisation of the process across the media, akin to the joint production approach used in the Presidential Debates would be the best solution, the discussions started too late in the day when individual media houses had already deployed in-house plans,” MCK stated.

It added: “While efforts had been made to deploy media personnel countrywide, the sudden availability of the IEBC forms 34A on the portal was unprecedented and caught many newsrooms flatfooted.”