Thursday, August 16, 2007

I will not sign the bill but here is my take

One thing you need to know about the way the Kenyan press covers state house and the government, and I mean even the quasi respectable ones like the Daily Nation, is this: Most of these guys are silly. Many of them have never been to a Journalist school, in fact. They only come to read the papers when companies employ them and they get them for free, most want something to post a favorable review, which we refuse to do. Honestly. They do no reporting. Unless you count talking to other reporters as "reporting." And that's if they're diligent. The really lazy ones (and that's most of them) just make their stuff up out of whole cloth. Take, for example, the guy who wrote the piece in the Standard. (). Has he ever met me? No. Does "()" even exist? Nobody here has ever heard of him. For all we know it's just a made-up character with a name that's a sly reference to Evelyn Waghula,like maybe she was his grandmother or something.

As far as I know the only Kenyan publication that actually churns some stories somehow is The Daily Nation. And even those guys just get their stories by clipping articles from international daily papers and the internet. Ever see an actual quote from an actual person in a story in The Nation? Once in a while, maybe. But not usually. You know that big cover story they just did on Me? We never heard a word from them when they were putting it together.

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