Mainstream Media Display Fear of Social Media

The PanAfrican Media Summit is happening in Nairobi. It is jointly organised by Africa Media Initiative and Nation Media group and it comes at a time when Nation is Celebrating 50 years since the first publication of the then “The Nation”. Key points from the discussions have basically been on how African media can tell the African story, how citizen journalism is making an impact and how “ethical” are citizen journalists.

I retorted in a twitter post that African Media cannot tell African story when all we get are copy paste of stories from Reuters, AP, CNN, Aljazeera and news agencies which are not African.

Ethics is not a preserve of mainstream media since they have contributed much more in social injustices like RTML in Rwanda did support the killing of moderate Hutus and Tutsis.

So I don’t see why Wangethi Mwangi of Nation saying that there citizen journalists lacks ethics which is wrong since even some some are trained journalist. And when does a citizen media become mainstream.

The leaders present have has a cry that the media should be more reasonable which to me translates to “please go slow on us”.

But the whole media wont be forgotten by many Kenyans when Kibaki first uttere “Facebook”, “Mespace” (myspace) and Youtube.

The paragraph from President Kibaki’s statement reads;

The increased access to mobile phones and the internet has given rise to new media that resonates well with our young population. However even those of us born before the computer age, appreciate the contribution of these new avenues of communication. Indeed, the advent of citizen journalism has become possible because of tools such as SMS, blogs, and social networking websites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Myspace.

I know that President Kagame is on twitter and PM Raila is on Facebook. Kibaki should start using social media.

Please find the full presidential speech here