Journalists are shameless people, and over the years through a system that begs the state for favors, they have become like lapdogs.
We have heard stories of scribes given as low as Sh3000, and that’s one who is very lucky, to write articles.
Well, today such happenings took place in Eldoret.
Hi Cyprian,
Eldoret based journalist on Monday 3rd fought over cash handout given by Kesses MP Swarrup Mishra.
The Journalists had gone to cover an event where the MP was donating outside catering equipment to women in his constituency.
The fight erupted after two of the scribes wanted to take a lion’s share of the handout.
Brown envelope journalism
In 2017, lawyer Miguna Miguna dissected the problem of ‘brown envelope journalism’.
Miguna wrote, ‘Kenyan journalism is at the Intensive Care Unit. It is dying from an acute bout of discernible poor training, incompetence, ineffective self-regulation, unprofessionalism, infiltration by organised criminal enterprises and an inability or unwillingness to serve the public interests. If the “patient” is not cured soon, it will die’.
He warned about the dangers of Journalists taking money in order to cover stories.
“…many Kenyans find reading daily newspapers, listening to radio and watching television shows to be a very painful experience. News stories are poorly sourced and written. Readers are distracted by typographical and grammatical errors. Some stories are plainly manufactured. The quality and rigour of commentaries are so poor that many readers wonder how and for what reasons the writers or articles were chosen. The standard of media professionalism has deteriorated so much that there is hardly any residual gain the public gets from its products”.
