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Snapshots: Journalists are crap? Well, so is everyone else!

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Journalists are crap? well, so is everyone else!

The general consensus is that journalists are frivolous, poorly educated idiots who couldn’t write a grammatically correct sentence if a loaded gun was pointed at their heads.

Editors have not been spared either. We (I happen to be a member of that sorry class) are thought to be even dafter than our juniors. “Journalism is dead,” everyone scoffs.

Our political detractors, it seems, have only stopped short of saying we were conceived by the roadside, which could as well be true. Who knows?

I will be frank. I occasionally see howlers in newspapers, including the one I edit, that make me cringe. TV reporters can also make you ‘blush.’ So, I would be the last person to claim, as a politician would, that we are being fought by jealous elements.

My take, however, is that there has been a horrendous decline in the quality of the Kenyan professional over the years. The day Obama was delivering a breathtaking speech in Nairobi for instance, a governor was wrestling an MCA at a funeral. The two quarrelled over a culvert or something.

At roughly the same period, a senator was photographed wearing what seemed to be a policeman’s reflector jacket, reportedly to breach security at JKIA and inch closer to the US leader, even though it has been pointed out that it might have been an earlier photo.

 But any rascal should know that impersonating a police officer is a punishable offence; and one Waiganjo is facing charges in court for allegedly doing something like that.

Meanwhile, even as we speak, kids, including those who become journalists, transit through school and enroll at universities without being able to speak coherently in English (remember those embarrassing TV interviews after the Garissa terrorist attack?). That means there is something very fishy about the quality of teachers, don’t you think?

Not that you can blame them. University is rubbish and a lot of people who walk around claiming they are varsity lecturers would be jailed if they attempted to teach a class at a proper university.

You can’t claim to be a thinker yet all you do is dictate 20-year-old notes in class, pretend to mark exam papers and then lose the marks. How does an adult lose a student’s marks?

Even modern witchdoctors and night runners are as useless as the average pastor who pretends to have visions. The clowns who are propped up as councils of ‘elders’ by politicians and the chef whose French fries taste like chicken droppings are no different.

You would imagine that prostitutes and thieves would at least remain true to their calling, but wapi. These days, the average hooker is a part-time thief who drugs you to death instead of making you die of ‘sweetness.’ Pickpocketing is dead, so thugs kill 80-year-old women to steal Sh20.

In the circumstances, it gets a tad irritating when everyone points fingers at journalists. If a medic can inject 30 kids into paralysis, people shouldn’t get their knickers in a twist when a reporter makes reference to ‘grizzly fatal accidents’ where all survivors are treated and discharged.

Yes, show me a true professional and I will show you a liar.

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