Media must learn to tell stories using numbers
Is media biting more than it can chew? From the just concluded General Election, the answer may seem to be positive. But to understand it we must go back to the basics. What really is the role of media in society?
Simply put, the role of media is to tell stories and journalists are the storytellers. But somebody must be the subject of the story told by journalists through the media.
Increasingly in Africa, media have moved to do more than tell stories. Part of the reason why this so seems obvious. For the media to tell their stories they need freedom. But governments in Africa have seldom given the media the freedom to operate.
In the post-independence era, most African governments saw the media as appendages of the ruling regime whose job was to tell the stories but from the perspective of the government only. This led to the establishment of State broadcasters and people who did not tell the story from the perspective of the government were persecuted.
In this country we need not be reminded of the number of times that media houses were banned, printing presses disabled and journalists not only harassed but some exiled, maimed or detained.
And so media moved from merely telling stories to fighting for the right to tell stories. This is the space for civil society and as some media experts have argued, increasingly, African media see themselves as civil society.
Could this be where Kenyan media have found themselves? After telling the story of the elections, the media probably started investing emotionally in the elections which led to their organising the presidential debates.
There were dangers lurking here. If media are storytellers in which others featured, but in this case, media were moving to stage the event and it can be argued, becoming the subject of the story. If media becomes the subject of the story, then who will tell the story?
What was billed to be the major presidential debate for the 2022 elections seemed to pass by a whimper. Two of the candidates never showed up for the debate but the media could not tell the story from a dispassionate point of view since they were really part of the story.
Then came the tallying of votes. It does appear that the media were ill-prepared to effectively tally the votes simply because tallying the votes is not storytelling, it is acting in the story. What started with elaborate graphics collapsed along the way and the media sat back to wait to tell the story of numbers when the numbers eventually came out.
We all learn lessons from this. First to draw the lessons are the institutions where storytellers are told how to tell their stories. Given the changing nature of stories, it is no longer sufficient for one to be a clever juggler of words. Mastery of language is important but now it is equally critical to master numbers. It is what is called data journalism. Journalists, going forward, cannot fail to understand numbers and what those numbers mean.
The implication of this is that right at the entry-level, universities must revise their admission criteria to require a pass in mathematics for those pursuing journalism. This will equip future journalists with the skills to know what story is hidden in numbers.
It is not that this was not important in the past, but societal evolution has raised the importance of technology in everyday life. The language of technology is, however, more centred on numbers than on ordinary language.
While journalists must move to understand numbers, the media should focus on its primary mission which is to tell stories, hold rulers accountable for their acts and their omissions, keep society entertained, and simply do all that media is meant to do in society. More than that is biting too much.
—The writer is the dean, School of Communication, Daystar University
