Media should deliver on its public service role

Does the media serve the public good? If yes then this is the best time the truism in that statement should come out. The spread of the coronavirus is an existential threat to this country.

Yet Kenyans know very little about this. In any case there is so much dis-information on social media that it is difficult for the average citizen not to be confused.

Just for starters, a Nairobi preacher was recorded making a joke of the coronavirus and pointing out it attacks only the elderly.

A video doing the rounds on the Internet suggests the virus only attacks the rich. That liquids with alcohol content are effective in dealing with the virus on people’s hands has been interpreted by some to suggest drinking alcohol would deal with the virus. 

Somewhere in the countryside, a minister of the church wasted an opportunity. It is a tradition in the Anglican church for the minister to greet members after the end of the service by shaking their hands.

In rural Kenya they take this further. Not only does everybody shake the hands of the minister but everybody must shake the hand of everybody else.

Yet the advice the minister gave his congregants was to wash their hands every five minutes. Further he told them to dig pit latrines, wash dishes and serve food on clean dishes and boil water before drinking. 

This is all good advice and which the villagers need to adopt. But specifically, with regard to coronavirus, the man of the cloth was of the view it is a distant thing, will take time to reach the village and while they need to take precaution, they need not worry.

It is in the middle of this confusion the national media have a role to play. The role is really simple.

Media houses need to take a break from making money through advertisements and instead develop brief educational material that would help the public separate the wheat from the chaff.

The British Broadcasting Corporation has had some announcements as have some media in India and other countries.

To be fair to local media, some of them have had Public Service Announcements on the subject but not in a coordinated and systematic manner. 

Britain and India are democracies with media that are predominantly capitalist in orientation even if the media structure for BBC is not strictly speaking drawn from the capitalist mode.

In Kenya, as it is indeed true for most of the countries of the South, radio is still king and the TV rules the news hour.

Both radio and TV occupy a public resource, the spectrum, which they hold in trust on behalf of the public.

Granted, the broadcast houses pay for the privilege of broadcasting on this resource but there are other obligations that come with it.

That the broadcast houses are ethical is just one of them. But even more important is that they should use this resource to come to the aid of the public at a time of national challenge.

The spread of coronavirus is probably the biggest challenge to our society yet. We have to change our way of doing things. We are a society bred on a culture of touch and of socialisation.

We meet sometimes just for the sake of meeting. We never miss an opportunity to gather together. We drink from the same pot, using the same drinking straws.

It is a taboo to miss a funeral of a relative where we mourn and wipe away the tears with our hands. Coronavirus threatens all these.

So we have to learn new ways of behaving without the spread of misinformation. This is where the public service role of the media should come in to provide the correct information of dealing with this threat.

There are things that we should do and there are things we should not do. This should be spelt out clearly in short messages that the public is treated to. The media will, in this process, be performing a public service role. — The writer is the dean, School of Communication, Daystar University

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