The Standard: The newspaper for unfairness and injustice

Self Editor’s Note: If you have been following Our Man in America – as you should – you’ve probably been wondering when he is going write something favorable of his surrogate country. Here it is.

Three words sparked my desire to give America kudos: shoddy Kenyan journalism.

More than two years ago, in a rant called “The Standard: Outlandish Every Day,” I went after one of Kenya’s leading dailies for the pathetic standard of their journalism. Back then the newspaper’s slogan was, “Outstanding Every Day.” Since then, the newspaper has changed its motto to, “For Fairness and Justice.”

But little else has changed in the newsroom.

Reading the Standard, sometimes it’s hard for me to visualize “fairness and justice.” Take, for instance, this excerpt from a story published on Oct. 19:

James Odhiambo, a casual worker at a bread factory, is still admitted in a city hospital where well-wishers rushed him unconscious. His attempted suicide followed a heated quarrel with his wife after she declined to have sex with him without a condom … Odhiambo, who vowed never to eat a sweet with its wrapping, accused his wife of being untrustworthy and unfaithful. He claimed to have been spending nights in the factory whenever they were forced to work late. He accused his wife of having affairs with other men and that was why she was afraid of infecting him with a disease she could have picked in one of her escapades. Their quarrels climaxed one evening when Odhiambo complained of going for even two weeks without making love to his legally wedded wife for whom he had paid dowry.

I’m tempted to comment on the use of the word “climaxed” in a story about a guy who didn’t get laid, but I’m going to abstain.

Here in America too we have issues of ethics in the media – sensational stories and all – but an article like this wouldn’t have made it into the pages of any American newspaper I know.

Where were the Standard’s editors? Couldn’t it have been fair and just for an editor to tell the reporter to at least check out the poor man’s story about being at the factory on the nights he didn’t come home?  Excuse me for being a dissenter here, but “champion of workers’ rights” is not what crosses my mind when someone mentions my country of birth. The newspaper itself has reported about Kenyans dying in fires because employers barricaded doors to keep employees from stealing.

As in many similar things I have commented on before, I know many are going to come after me. They will label me a misogynist like they have before. They will say I’m siding with the African men who spread HIV to their poor wives.  But whatever they say, my answer to them is going to be the same: I have reasonable doubt.

What if Odhiambo is telling the truth?

Also, there is reasonable doubt that – as one Kenyan commented on a Facebook link to the story – “If he had alternatives he couldn’t have tried [suicide].

Again, I’m not saying that is the case; I just think it is possible, and the Standard did nothing to erase my doubt.

Sadly, my kinfolk will not ask questions because they are used to low standards of journalism.

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Tags: american jounalism, fairness and justice, kenyan journalism, our man in america, the standard kenya