Karen Rothmyer
It didn’t take long for the complaints to start pouring in after the Star on March 8 ran a photo on Page 3 of a couple engaged “in the act” (as the caption put it). The photo was one of two accompanying a story about police efforts to put an end to the use of a park in Kakamega as a place to have sex.
One of the earliest came from Amanda Khamati, who wrote: “Page 3 in today’s paper has the story of a ‘sex party’ in Muliro Gardens. Now there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the story. However, the picture of a couple having sex was absolutely unnecessary.”
Other readers were also quick to weigh in. Lynesther Mureu wrote: “That was not moral and responsible journalism.” Sam Karanja said that he objected to being taken by surprise, since the paper “is not positioned as a sleaze rag.” And Muriithi Muriuki criticized the photo showing a “lack of taste in a newspaper that wants to be seen as [a] decent publication.”
In short order the Media Council, citing a legal prohibition on publishing obscene material except in cases of overriding public interest and its own Code of Conduct, referred the matter to its complaints commission.
Let’s start with a little background. The offending photo and a number of others began making the rounds of Kenya blogs in late February. When I did a web search for the last month on the words “Muliro Gardens” and “sex” I got almost 850 hits, and when I checked out a few of the sites, I found not only photos but also dozens of comments from Kenyans ranging from shock (“such vice portrays a wicked society”) to enthusiasm (“seems Kakamega is my next holiday destination”).
On February 24, the Standard published a story about the goings-on in the park and the fact that photos had been posted on the Internet. But perhaps because no graphic photo accompanied the story, the piece got little if any attention.
Star CEO William Pike says he learned about the photos on March 5 from a Kenyan acquaintance who later emailed him the URL for one of the websites. Pike then asked that the paper’s Kakamega correspondent be instructed to do a story on police reaction to sex in the park. Pike said the objective was “to cover the problem.”
From here on, accounts of what happened get a little murky. There is general agreement that at the 3pm news meeting on March 7, it was decided that the story would be used the following day along with a photo of two policemen and a (seemingly fully-clothed) couple to whom the police appear to be talking.
The Star photo editor was out that day, leaving one of the staff photographers to sit in for him. The acting photo editor says that he came late to the meeting and doesn’t recall any definitive decision to use only one picture. “What I heard is that if you use the picture it needs to be blurred” (to protect the couple’s identity),” he says. After examining the layout, he concluded that the photo of the couple and the police, on its own, didn’t tell the story. So he looked through the possibilities and came up with the second photo showing the same couple, but without the police and with the woman straddling her seated companion. “We are not in the old times now,” he says, explaining his choice. “The public is learning.” He consulted with the news editor who recalls, “I said okay. I didn’t think more about it.”
Editor Catherine Gichuru says she was unaware of the added photo when she left the newsroom a little after 6pm. Pike says that he saw it at about 6.30pm, just before the page was sent to the printer. At that point, he sought a second opinion, asking the production editor whether he thought it was okay. “He said yes and I left it at that,” Pike says. The production editor confirms this account.
One final query on the photo came from the sub-editor handling the page, who says that when she saw it, she checked with the news editor and the acting photo editor to be sure they’d approved its use. She also consulted the revise editor, who suggested that the faces be blurred further, which was done.And that was it-until the paper hit the streets on the morning of March 8.
It wasn’t only readers who were upset. Vendors also complained. So did circulation and advertising staffers. And so did a number of reporters and editors. At the 9am news meeting that morning, one of the political reporters argued, “It’s important for the public to know that this is happening. How many children pass this park every day?” Countered another, “Can you take this paper to your house?” The debate continued through the day.
There’s no question, I would say, that the photo was outside of current Kenyan norms for national publications. The expressions of outrage attest to that. Still, as the many ribald comments on the websites illustrate, standards are changing. Moreover, the Star has tried to establish itself as unafraid to challenge the status quo in the political sphere, so one could make the argument that it should do the same in other areas. Reader Christopher Kims commented in a supportive email that he is grateful to the Star “for always being fearless and putting things as they are and not as they should (have) be(en).”
On the matter of news value, the defenders of the photo are on shakier ground. If the Star’s concern was to highlight the social value of attractive public parks, as its first-day editorial claimed (in what struck me as an effort at pre-emptive justification) a photo of garbage-strewn grass might have done just as well. It also seems to me that to argue for the “public interest” in a case like this is to cheapen a journalistic defence that should be reserved for the gravest occasions. (The Star, to its credit, didn’t claim such a defence in its second-day editorial, falling back instead on a rather weak claim that one role of newspapers is to “provoke debate.”)
My own opinion is that the Star, which I admire for its iconoclasm, this time went a bit too far. But I also think that the reaction was more than a little overheated. Couples having sex in a public park is not an issue that threatens the foundations of the nation, and nor is a picture of such activity.
What concerns me more is the ad hoc way in which the decision to run the picture was made. Newsroom pressure to make judgments quickly and keep the process moving, especially as the deadline approaches, is intense. Nonetheless, I would advocate a procedure for making potentially controversial decisions-something as simple as a five-minute private meeting involving three or four senior people-that could be triggered by any editor. That would allow the paper to say that it had exercised considered judgment. It would also lessen the chances of the Star becoming the story.
Source: www.nairobistar.com
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