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How to tell when newspaper story is driven by sensationalism and bias
Judicial Service Commission chairperson Prof Olive Mugenda, flanked by commissioners, announces their nomination of Justice Martha Koome’s nomination as the Chief Justice at the Supreme Court buildings in Nairobi on April 27.
What you need to know:
- Journalists are supposed to be neutral, not to be part of the story, unless they are giving an eyewitness account.
- They are supposed to get out of the way and let their sources or pundits talk.
Readers at times complain of sensationalised stories but it is not always easy to pin down such stories. The Oxford dictionary defines sensationalism as “a way of getting people’s interest by using words that are intended to shock you or by presenting facts and events as worse or more shocking than they really are.”
In other words, sensationalism is a way of presenting a story to provoke public interest or excitement at the expense of accuracy. Such a story is also likely to be biased.
The story, “Supreme Court, CJ fast-traced hiring kicks up a storm”, published in the last Sunday Nation, is one of those few stories that are easy to pin down as driven by sensationalism and bias. According to Collins, Philip Ochieng’s favourite dictionary, “if something causes a storm, it causes an angry or excited reaction from a large number of people”.
So, where was the large number of people? Where was the storm and who kicked it up?
The headline is accompanied by a catchline: “Pundits question the speed at which the JSC rushed to name nominees for the vacant slots, creating room for controversy.”
Pundits are experts in a subject that journalists call upon to give their opinions to the public on a particular issue. They help to shed more light, authority, facts and credibility in a story, and this is what readers of the Nation story expected after reading the catchline. But that did not happen.
“The speed with which the JSC was able to announce the successful candidate, just about two hours after the... interviews ended, was shocking,” he writes in the third paragraph before bringing in the pundits. So, we do not know who was shocked, apart from the journalist himself.
Journalists are supposed to be neutral, not to be part of the story (unless they are giving an eyewitness account). They are supposed to get out of the way and let their sources or pundits talk.
The story tells us that the rush the “pundits” questioned is the fact that “Prof Olive Mugenda announced [the nominee] just about two hours after the commission had finished interviewing Ms Yano”. One also wonders: Is deliberating for two hours rushing?
Hunting for pundits?
Who were the pundits and what was their punditry? Was there controversy in announcing the successful candidate? Or was the journalist hunting for one? The first pundit is one of the candidates, Alice Yano. But the story says she declined “to discuss much”. All she says is: “I think they (JSC) have their own ways of doing things.”
The second is an unnamed “JSC insider”. He or she apparently told the journalist that “the speed with which JSC moved to announce the nomination of Justice [Martha] Koome” was “a departure from the past interviews when JSC would take some days before announcing the outcome of the interviews”. It is not clear from the story, however, who is speaking here; the journalist or the “insider”.
The journalist then goes on to quote the insider: “Now the Godspeed (sic) which we have seen is very interesting. It is [as] if there was no discussion that went into the process. They mark, and when the interview is done, that is it.”
The third and last pundit is former JSC member Tom Ojienda. The journalist says “he seemed to agree that the speed with which JSC announced the outcome of the interviews was too quick for comfort and unfair to candidates like Ms Yano, who had just left the interview tent some few hours earlier.” But all he quotes Prof Ojienda as saying is: “ I think the JSC owes it to Kenyans to show that there was some level of engagement with the outcome of the interviews.”
The first and third pundits are non-committal, wishy-washy or equivocal. The second hides behind a veil of anonymity.
All told, the story does not have the facts to support the claim that the JSC fast-tracked the hiring in a way that was prejudicial to some of the candidates, that the speed was shocking, or that it kicked up a storm and a controversy. It’s clearly a story that is driven by sensationalism and bias.
The Public Editor is an independent news ombudsman who handles readers’ complaints on editorial matters, including accuracy and journalistic standards. Email: [email protected]. Call or text 0721989264.
