Comparative study of the Nation and The Standard newspapers coverage of the post 2007 general election violence

Abstract

The media are charged with providing an important service to their citizen or consumer thorough and unbiased information that will aid them make conscious and conscientious decisions in many aspects of their consumer and citizen life. To understand the news treatment in coverage of post general election events, we argue that what changed, and changed decisively with post December 2007 General Election events, were citizen perceptions of the outcome of the election mote than the actual reality. The rational significance is that, in spite of the upsurge in studies into the concept of media effects, there are minimal focused studies on how media treated news in the Kenyan context, particularly during the crisis that followed the December 2007 General Election. It was necessary for the findings therefore to contribute to the already existing body of knowledge on the effects and influences of media coverage and treatment of news. Specifically the study intended to investigate the extent to which the election outcome influence the events that occur then, whether the media, their sources and public communication supported an agenda that might have been detrimental to the public in Kenya and to investigate whether the media had a like-minded agenda. A content analysis was carried out. The approach - based and the language based criteria were adopted to focus on manner of story coverage. The study found that a variety of framing devices were utilized. Disproportionate allocation of time or unwarranted attention to certain news items was evident. There was blur line between fact and opinion and individual evaluation tended to be treated as a source regardless of whether it was credible or not. What dominated to some extend were speculations and predictions. Events of no importance were given prominence and when the superficial of the irrelevant are interwoven with facts of real significance; News was cobbled together from random facts and presented as whole, or partial truths were assembled to form the appearance of a complete truth. Partial truths were used to obfuscate the real issues. Facts were presented in such a way as to cause misinterpretation by implication, where the implicit conclusion drawn by the audience is favorable to particular interests. Individual's or even whole communities and government presented events in a way that stirred unfounded or exaggerated doubts and fears with the aim of condoning subsequent action. Silence was maintained on facts or events presumed to be of no interest to the public. Manipulation often lurks in the things left unmentioned. The most common form of media misrepresentation is suppression by omission. Sometimes the omission included not just vital details of a story but the very important issues. This research theorized that the events after the December 2007 General Election can best be understood as symbolizing a critical culture shift in the predominant news frame used by the Kenya mass media for understanding issues of national interest, altering perceptions of risk at home and interpersonal threats, which turn out to be true according to the findings.