In crisis, media and State must be allies
By Levi Obonyo, July 4, 2025Covering perilous times is always a challenge for the media. How to balance patriotism and truth-telling, or what is often referred to in the press as playing the watchdog role. Sometimes, being a patriot means prioritising the nation’s greater good and remaining silent about some uncomfortable truths.
In times of war, do you reveal the locations and arsenals of your country’s army, which could give the enemy an advantage? This is a space where the principles of journalism could easily collide with the call to patriotism.
This seems to be the issue the country has been dealing with over the past week. Protests continued in certain parts of the country, and the media broadcast these events into people’s living rooms.
Some people believe that media content prompts viewers to replicate the events they have seen. A scholar, decades ago, posited that exposing the public to violence could lead to them acting violently.
It is a contested scholarship position, as yet other scholars have argued, that audiences are rational and, rather than simply replicating what they see, they tend to act obstinately, refusing to follow unthinkingly what they see in the media.
Debates, however, are suited for the comfort of conference halls and classrooms. What does one do when governing a state? Restricting media coverage of unfolding national events, especially those in which the state has a vested interest, has become increasingly the norm rather than the exception, even in countries that champion media freedom as a value.
In the Kenyan approach, the broadcast space regulator, the Communications Authority, appears to have left its fingerprints all over the place with its note to the media houses. Most sophisticated media markets would achieve the same effect, but with different approaches, often acting so subtly that most members of the public would not even be aware of the state’s influence.
Of interest to many is the place of the CA in media regulation. At the heart of this debate is whether the CA is the body envisaged in Article 34 of the Constitution or whether that body is, in fact, the Media Council of Kenya. The recent court ruling on the matter should have settled this debate.
However, there is still a subtle matter that often escapes attention. What is the difference, from a mandate perspective, between the MCK and the CA? It would seem that one is focused on journalism – the software – while the other is focused on the hardware of the trade.
Consider the analogy of a railway line and its carriages. One might argue that regulating the railway line and the carriages falls within one domain, while regulating the content carried in the carriages is a different matter. Journalism is the material held in the carriages, which is the domain of the MCK, while the CA regulates the lines and carriages.
While the MCK is concerned with journalistic content, broadcasters indeed carry a range of content beyond this. It is this murky space that causes confusion and a lack of clarity regarding the boundaries.
With so many news sources these days, what media house would be streaming Mexican soaps in the middle of flowing images of violence in the country on other platforms? That could mark the beginning of the decline of the media house.
The state and the media may be adversaries in the best of times, but in times of national crisis, it behoves the two players to hang together, because, as Kenyan leaders are wont to say, the country is bigger than all of us.
The writer is the Dean of Daystar University’s School of Communication.