When journalists cross the line separating facts from opinion

Marcus Waweru says John Kamau’s front-page story, “How KTDA steals from tea farmers” (Daily Nation, October 9, 2019) was “tabloid journalism”.

He says the story, published in full on pages 10 and 11 under the headline “KTDA’s inept marketing and undemocratic practices subjecting farmers to servitude”, bordered on “personal opinion” and was “evidently biased”.

He says Mr Kamau “not only penned severely subjective and sensational statements in the piece but also failed to provide sources of the allegations that were made therein”.

The story “exposed a trend in the media” where writers make unsubstantiated claims. “It was also not lost on me that the piece failed to provide KTDA with an opportunity to give their side of the story.”

Mr Waweru cites a December 14, 2017 ruling by the Media Council of Kenya’s (MCK) Complaints Commission reprimanding NMG over an article in the Sunday Nation of June 29, 2014, surprisingly under the same headline: “How KTDA steals from small farmers”.

KTDA had complained that the Nation did not let them give its side of the story.

Commissioners Esther Aduma, Kwamboka Oyaro and Henry Maina ruled that “there were no discernible efforts” to seek the views of KTDA before publishing the article, in breach of the Code of Conduct for the Practice of Journalism in Kenya.

Clause 1 of the Code (Accuracy and Fairness) requires that comments shall be sought from anyone who is mentioned in an unfavourable context.

Mr Waweru says it is “therefore shocking to see the Nation repeating the same headline and proceeding to write a story that is near-similar to what had been published in 2014”.

In the MCK ruling, NMG was fined Sh300,000 for failing to seek KTDA’s comments and other violations of the Code.

Does the Nation practise tabloid journalism? The Nation is a tabloid in size (as opposed to a broadsheet) but it does not practise tabloid journalism — lurid and sensational journalism, what we call in this country “gutter press” journalism.

The NMG editorial policy states that editorial content must be presented in an attractive but disciplined, sober, consistent and non-sensationalist format.

Editors are required to avoid “the temptation to run sensational but possibly biased or incomplete stories just to sell papers”.

And headlines must not be sensationally provocative; they must justify the matter printed below them.

Mr Kamau’s article is, without a doubt, a vicious attack on KTDA. He ignored the Code of Conduct for the Practice of Journalism in Kenya — a statutory requirement — by failing to contact KTDA to give their side of the story.

But he made use of unnamed “insiders” to confirm his thesis. But that is not what the Code means by “comments shall be sought from anyone who is mentioned in an unfavourable context”.

As to his “severely subjective and sensational statements”, “personal opinion” and “evidently biased” statements, there are no specifics provided by Mr Waweru for me to investigate. Nor does he pinpoint where Mr Kamau “failed to provide sources”.

His criticism, however, hints at a general trend, not to make unsubstantiated claims as he says but to analyse and interpret the news, which has its own risks of crossing the line between facts and opinion.

When Bomet Governor Joyce Laboso died, the Daily Nation of July 30, 2019 published her picture on the front page under the splash headline, “Smiling with angels”. That headline was opinion-based.

Journalism, however, is a continuum of truth in which journalists move from to objective news to opinion or vice versa. Bias can be measured in terms of how close or far one is to fact-based reporting.

NMG policy strives for fact-based reporting. At the same time, the policy encourages analytical and interpretative journalism.

It generally states: “The trend must be towards a wise mix and balance of reporting, analysis and interpretative journalism to help our audiences and readers better understand the issues.”

But the policy still requires journalists to differentiate clearly between facts and opinion.