Disability is not Inability

:: Media in Civic education

A day to Easter this year saw the begining of a new interactive and inclusive NEWSLINE Programme on KTN that makes you NOT miss Luis Otieno who together with Swaleh Mdoe, Catherine Kasavuli and Effie Hunja voted for The Abrahamovich of the Kenyan Media League: CITIZEN TV. The last three months has seen a kind of media unprecedented preparations in readiness for the historical political events scheduled for the year end.

TV is increasingly a powerful shaper of public opinion and civic education. The need for care and responsibility cannot be underestimated.

Those of us who watched KTN NEWSLINE unfortunately were happy with what we saw albeit by inclusion standards. For the first time in media Civic education history a whole debate was translated into pure Kenya sign language. This was a first that many of us in the disability sector are happy about and hope its sets the stage for more inclusive civic discourse especially in this extraordinary period of political labour pains associated with the twin pregnancy transitional elections and constituional review process.

Media is awash with editorial repositioning, getting ready to midwife the already explosive labour pains. The usual indicators in Kenyan political body are already significant almost eight months to the dates. There are tribal clashes somewhere in Mt Elgon that just wont go away. Ragtag gangs like the Mungikis and chinkororos and the Taliban are already a problem, the police is being beefed up and being given what others see as political responsibilities, the civil service is being told to support the party of the day or face the door.

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The role of the media is to referee

There ia increasingly the need for panels in these civic education media programming to be balance. Representatives of both sides need to be present. There is also need for the government to have media a list of outspoken technocrats who will be responible to assist politicians in these opinion battles. Politicians also need to take these battles seriously.

It is also time that someone tore into those so called manifestoes and we discuss them publicly. Call the presidential aspirant or leader with his or her list of techs and let us discuss the manifestos in detail. This should be done in a manner that assumes either the current or a new constituional dispensation. Then lets put them on record so that come their election we can be able evaluate them on the basis of their handling of various scenerios as they unfold. This is the work of the editorial media.


Improve Content management

Politiciians or cheerleaders wheather technocrat or street should not be free wheeling during debate on national TV. Also the panel from the public representing various stakeholders need to clearly understand the topic and its limits.

The referee need to ensure that content as much as time is controlled to enable a satisfactory answer to be given to the public. The rf need to know the institutional background that the topic relates to and its current challenges and possibilties within the current constitution.

This would help get rid of the rhetoric and cut out blubbers. The need to pin down views, answers and positions concrete enough to assist the public gain some form of realistic opinion alternatives or differences. Wahome Muchiri, Luis Otieno and increasingly Gichuru have made significant progress in this direction but still has some areas to be desired.


Reducing editorial propaganda control

Media is not like safaricom and Celtel where we can allow some form of discrimination to protect your clientle as Micheal Joseph would put it. It is a fact that there are traditional Nation TV viewers or Nation Newspaper readers and there are Traditional Standard or KTN clientle. The way a media behaves to keep its clientle is crucial to objectivity. So it is improtant to consider the impact of editorial partisanship.

Questions are also increasingly being used to divide an issue. The need to make the debates interactive where viewers can call in is very good. However quality of the questions with some latitude to editorial support paricular positions need to build some form of clear thinking to solicit quality participation. Majority would vote according to the largest number of viewers of the station. The media need to understand this and take the opportunity to educate its viewers on the alternative opinons and the implications. This helps alot in reducing emotions when the sides meet in explosive situations.


But more so they should mobilise support for positions or opinions that are tenable within the clear constitutional basis. Constitutional review debate should be clearly railed within a good understanding of where we are coming from and what changes are necessary and what are the alternative views on the same challenges.

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