Many moons ago, when I was younger and better-looking, I worked at Nation Senda. Every morning, after a lifetime of sufferation looking for parking on Kimathi Street and Banda Street, I would get into the lift to the fifth floor of Nation Senda (I know, I know – I should have taken the stairs). My day would then be spent between fifth floor (where my desk was) and sixth floor (where the television studio was). Those locations are important, and you will see why, in a minute.
In Nation Senda, in addition to the fifth floor, where the television and radio guys (and the CEO, and the HR Director) sat, were other floors. Third floor was for the grizzled old hands of the newspaper. Those ink-stained veterans in short sleeves who believed that they were the beating heart of journalism. They have their place in this story, but it is the fellows a floor below them who are our concern today. The second floor. The perpetually stressed, prematurely graying frenemies from the advertising department. On a good day, they would say hello to you. But the most common interaction was a snarling grimace. Second floor and fifth floor were only a spiral staircase away, but they might as well been across an impenetrable valley. I exaggerate for effect, but only a little.
At the core of this tension was a fundamental disagreement over how to marry advertising with news. The journalists of the fifth floor (occasionally joined in these skirmishes by third-floor peeps) insisted that every story and every interview carried on the airwaves needed to justify its news value. That commercial considerations should be the very last factor in deciding whether a story or interview deserved airtime. On the other hand, the advertising brigade believed that airtime (on television or radio) was a commodity on sale – one that could be offered as a standalone service, or as the add-on that would clinch an advertising deal.
This is the eternal tension in newsrooms. One side accuses the other of greed, and the other throws back an accusation of naïveté. ‘You are killing journalism!’ ‘Where do you think your salary comes from?’ The uneasy relationship between those responsible for gathering news (including through interviews) and those responsible for generating revenue, exists in every ‘real’ newsroom in every part of the world.
You know where this is leading: a consideration of Teddy Muthusi’s ‘rant’ (his word) about the ‘unreasonable’ (my word) demand for ‘freebie’ (his word again) on-air interviews. For Teddy (and the hundreds in his audience who agree with him in word and gesture), this is a sign of a broken media culture. A culture in which companies and their representatives are stealing food from the mouths of babes.
First, a little background may be apt. The business model of news organisations was thus: our journalists will seek the news wherever it is to be found. We will chase the story until it is fully told. It may make some people uncomfortable, but ultimately it is to the benefit of the audience – they know that this is the story that is the product of the best of our ability to report it and tell it. When you crack open a newspaper, or switch on your television of radio, you are consuming the unvarnished effort of journalistic enterprise, only leavened by the need to ensure coherence, correct grammar and the ethics and tenets of fairness. Many wore these efforts on their collective sleeves, boasting in the words of Peter Dunne (a true grizzled veteran) that their role was to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.
In return, the best news organisations would deliver so much value that they would gather audiences in droves. People in their millions would flock to that newspaper, or that radio or television station. In turn, having all these people’s attention and eyeballs in one place would be irresistible to people who needed to sell things to them. If I made pressure cookers, or motorcycles, or body lotion, and I needed to find an audience, there was a ready-made one in the most rigorous news outlets. It was a marriage made in heaven, and this symbiosis is where most of the age-old tropes in journalism come from: a pair of rookie reporters bringing down a President (the Washington Post team and Richard Nixon). An intrepid reporter forces companies and governments to reverse unjust policies and cure injustices, sometimes at great personal risk (John Allan Namu, Purity Mwambia, Paul Wafula and many more friends and colleagues).
But the potential antagonism is obvious. As a matter of fact, it is baked into the model. If a newsroom does its work well, it will piss off advertisers. There is not a single editor who has not been yelled at by an annoyed advertiser, and there is not a single advertiser who has not yelled at an editor. (Me, by the way, I have been the yell-er and the yell-ee). It is the nature of the beast.
There are complications to all this, however. The first has always existed. Hard news is hard news. In the Daily Nation of old, it was between the first page and around page 8, where the cartoons were. Hard news extended to the business pages and international news, but soon we came to what used to be known as the ‘back of the book’. Feature sections, profile interviews and others were always understood to be ‘softer’ (in contrast to hard news). If you wanted to feature the gardening habits of a CEO, you were not going to confront them with difficult questions about cash flow. There was an understanding that sometimes a truce was in order, because of the nature of these pages. Television also had ‘back of the book’ segments, with similar unspoken rules. The audience understood this well, and everyone was happy with this arrangement.
The second complication has become increasingly evident. Remember my reference to ‘real’ newsrooms? Even when I was in Nation Senda, there was a certain disdain held by third floor to fifth floor. There was a belief that we were not real journalists – that our job was to look pretty while they – the print reporters – did the hard slog of real reporting. Part of it was justified – media houses did not help themselves by fronting ‘personalities’ in their journalistic endeavours, and often making it evident that anchors were in place based entirely on their looks, and not their journalistic chops. But part of it was a simple misunderstanding of the structure of a television news story, versus a newspaper story. A typical script for a television ‘package’ is a few dozen words, which must include appropriate video and soundbites, while a newspaper story will often run into the thousands of words. ‘Sources say’ and ‘observers have noted’ is the print journalist’s shorthand to fit in their opinions and biases into their story, which television journalists did not have a chance to do. But I digress.
The real complication, and at the core of Teddy’s outrage, is what radio is. Radio has always been a chimera of a medium. As with Greek mythology, with its cobbled-together creature that was part lion, part goat and part snake, radio has never been able to define itself satisfactorily. Especially in the era of FM radio, the medium is an unresolved, wobbly and unwieldy amalgam of advertising medium, entertainment hub and ‘serious’ news site. In order to sustain their self-regard, radio stations position their presenters as journalists, when often their only journalistic activity is to read off a script and convey instructions from an unseen and unheard producer (an unfriendly observer might make the same point about some television personalities). Radio wants to carry the weighty responsibility of conveying serious content, while needing to remain a comfortable listen peppered with ad breaks, music and ‘presenter mentions’ where on-air personalities must convey insincere enthusiasm about rival brands.
Since radio stations offer themselves as audience aggregators, advertisers are obviously interested in their products and personalities being featured in radio programmes. And because they are personality-driven, the natural thing would be for brand managers, CEOs and others to banter in radio studios with the bubbly presenters. The unsaid quid pro quo for these appearances is that they are paid for. There is no expectation of difficult questions (‘your new detergent doesn’t actually remove stains that well, does it?’) much less a proper news breakthrough. These interviews are antithetically heavy on the fluff, while being unbearably light on real journalism. The audience does not expect much, and does not receive much in return. Everyone understands their place in the firmament.
To that point then, I am prepared to grant Teddy a licence to rant (despite his being a Patcherian).
However, the issue is when this ethos creeps in (as it is increasingly doing) into what was always expected to be real news and real journalism. Fifth and third floor vs. second floor was a reality for me, and I left the newsroom almost a decade ago. It is much worse now. Due to declining revenues, changes in audience behaviour, and new technologies and outlets, journalists find it harder and harder to protest their purity. Demands for quid pro quo interviews, and even for delicacy and self-censorship in reporting are commonplace. Advertisers feel that they hold the whip hand, and they make demands for the prestige of hard news interviews, but under soft, fluffy interview rules. It is but a short step from that to a simple transactional understanding – an interview on the 9 o’clock news, with our best and most respected anchor, costs this much.
Those respected anchors are gritting their teeth and being forced to grin and bear it more and more. When I was in the newsroom, I could afford to refuse such interviews despite the pressure. I felt the freedom to conduct interviews in the manner I felt best, with topics and questions of my choosing. Of course, I did not set out to be gratuitously confrontational, but I had the luxury to interrogate anyone sitting across from me. It was not always neat, and I had my share of uncomfortable conversations with the second floor, but it always seemed to work out eventually with my reputation mostly intact, and company revenues mostly undamaged.
The slippery slope is well established, now, though, down which countless journalists and newsrooms are merrily (but most often unhappily) sliding. Far too much journalism now is access journalism, with the implied threat and reward no longer bothering to be camouflaged. Interviews proceed with undue (and undeserved) deference on the part of the interviewer, who has to suppress their gag reflex even as they proceed.
But worse, much worse, is that we are now witnessing newsrooms where journalists do not know how to do it any differently. Access journalism, paid-for interviews and the almost complete elimination of the Chinese walls between advertising and journalism is the order of the day.
The buzzword all those years ago was ‘convergence’ – the melding of print, television, radio and online newsrooms into one happy family. But maybe now the convergence is complete. The Frankenstein’s monster of advertising-led journalism now stalks the land.
