Why foreign media covered the elections with their minds
made up
The run-up to the polls was characterised by ampli ed fuss over the behaviour of foreign press. However, as PETER MWAURA explains, the Western media covered the March 4th elections from the point of view of their countries foreign policy and relationship with Kenya.
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n an article titled "Confessions of a foreign journalist" published in the Sunday Nation of March 17, 2013, Michael Holman, a Londonbased journalist, said that Western journalists anticipated violence that failed to materialise, identified "flashpoints" that didn't ignite, and were baffled by the bloodshed that never took place during the general elections that took place in Kenya on March 4th. "Western commentators and columnists, foreign correspondents and analysts, experts and insiders, academics and ambassadors, we all, in our different ways, got it wrong," he said. The foreign media, in particular the British and the American, got it wrong because of the way foreign journalists have traditionally covered Africa. In general, the foreign media report Africa through convenient stereotypes and biases. They bring to the coverage their governments' foreign policy, as well as their readers expectations and needs. It does not matter whether they are covering elections or other social issues such as poverty. In an article titled "Hiding the Real Africa" published in the March-April 2011 Columbia Journalism Review, Karen Rothmyer, who until February 2013 was The Star public editor, writes that US journalism continues to portray a continent of unending horrors. "Last June, for example, Time magazine published graphic
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The Media
OBSERVER
Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni delivering a speech in Kenya at a national event.
pictures of a naked woman from Sierra Leone dying in childbirth," she writes. "Not long after, CNN did a story about two young Kenyan boys whose family is so poor they are forced to work delivering goats to a slaughterhouse for less than a penny per goat." She states that this attitude in reporting Africa goes back to the 19th century when the New York Herald sent Henry Stanley to central Africa to find David Livingstone. The famous explorer had in 1864 returned to Africa to find the source of the Nile River but for years little was heard from him or his whereabouts. "Reporters' attraction to certain kinds of Africa stories has a lot to do with the frames of reference they arrive with. Nineteenth century New York Herald correspondent Henry M. Stanley wrote that he was prepared to find Zanzibar 'populated by ignorant blacks, with great thick lips, whose general appearance might be compared to Du Chaillu's gorillas,' she writes.
Rothmyer, who is now a visiting fellow at Cambridge University, further explains: "In Kenya, where I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the late 1960s and where I returned to live four years ago, The New York Timesdescription of post-election violence in 2007 as a manifestation of 'atavistic' tribalism carried echoes of Stanley and other early Western visitors." The Henry M. Stanley mentality is today manifested in terms of the Western countries national interests as well as their relationship with the African country concerned. There is what is now called the "CNN effect", or the theory that the Western media reflect, and affect, the foreign policy of their countries. This is so because the media informs the public, creates public awareness and prejudices, and informs public policy. The reverse is also true as the media reflects the needs and wants of their society or the influential people in their society. At a very simple level, the "CNN effect" explains why it is almost