Top Nation Journalist Tells Off News Anchors For Their Dressing In This Candid Open Letter (pt 2)

This is the second and the last part of the open letter that was written by veteran Nation columnist Clay Muganda about news anchors and TV presenters:

“Years back, Kenyan viewers would probably know from roadside mechanics what makes of cars you drive.

Not any more.

Nowadays, viewers just have to watch breakfast TV — that lifestyle programming where you showcase the best of the best of you — and know how many slow-moving vehicles you drove past in the past month, how you parked, what makes of useless cars blocked your parking bay, and how you swatted them away…

Some pesky entertainment writers have argued that you should just read the news and be done with it since people do not need to know what you ate for dinner, which parties you attended, where you do your hair and nails, what perfume you wear, the works.

Forget about them for they know not what they are saying — just like you.

There were days when it was difficult to know whether you were dating or engaged.

Not any more. It is de rigueur to run into the studio set screaming, showing your ring, getting all excited and saying how your marriage, which you confuse with a wedding, will be a classy affair.

“Hey, hey, hey look at my ring. I am so engaged and I am going to have a wedding.

You must be happy because I am also happy,” you scream, making your co-presenters look bewildered and wonder why you did not just continue rotting in the radio studio.

But you certainly and suddenly make viewers forget about your numerous previous engagements, none of which ended in a wedding.

You are much more than TV presenters.

You are fashion icons, the top-notch type who cannot qualify to be even called catalogue or brochure models, but viewers are stuck with the extra flesh above your knees, your décolletages, the tattoos on your pelvic bones, your birth marks in your armpits, the scars under your soles all which you have made a healthy part of the TV menu which you feel viewers should definitely know about.

The reason you are the best is because you shoot from the bulging — or even padded — hips and take the dresses from the designers before they are done with them and you dress exactly how you saw model do it on runways.

In a sentence, you have put fashion before function just like Kenya’s media wished it to be and viewers remember your looks more than the news.

That is just right because you are simply conforming to Kenya’s modern Journalism Code of Conduct which advocates for more vision and less telling — and even lesser knowledge of current affairs!”