Top Nation Journalist Tells Off News Anchors For Their Dressing In This Candid Open Letter (pt 1)

I came across a very thought provoking piece that was done by a veteran Nation journalist; Clay Muganda. The piece calls to question everything we have come to accept about the way the evening news is presented to us. This is what he had to say:

Darlings, I trust that it is better late than never, especially if it is about thanking you for offering Kenyan viewers the all-important pieces of information in 2013, a year in which you not only revolutionised local television, but also changed the way Kenyans watch the news.

Dear screen sirens, Kenya’s female television presenters, this piece could have come earlier, but other things came in the way.

Still, why not deliver it when the less important distractions are out of the way?

If anything, you deserve your exclusive “me time”, which in essence is your time when all the Happy New Year noises and the attendant resolutions have died down.

Ladies, why lie, you have taken professionalism to the newest levels on the low side.

As I have already written, you have revolutionised the way news is presented and changed the way Kenya’s television viewers dress, speak, eat, breathe, date, chew gum, preach, walk, keep fit, treat their pets and children and shout — or whisper loudly.

Of course, news is boring and needs to be spiced up, given that Kenya is a country where leaders get misadvised every so often that it is hard to know when a bullet hits a politicians’ vehicle or vice-versa.

Just like the news, Kenyans are equally uninteresting and not interested in the humdrum, and usually switch off their TV sets or walk out of places where TV sets are during the news. That is passé.

Nowadays, thanks to your industriousness, ingenuity, and equinity, especially when it comes to the type of hair on your heads and of course, your different ambiguities, they run, nay, scramble, towards TV sets during the news just to watch you.

Gems of national importance

Visual beings they are these viewers, especially Kenyan men, but at times they listen to you just to hear those gems of national importance that you offer about yourselves, titbits which could previously only come from unreliable gossip columnists.

By watching you, viewers get double — or even up to sextuple — the information, and the pleasure, for less than half the price of gossip columnists’ poorly-written, factually-incorrect pieces.

They no longer wait for these plebeian columnists to tell them whether there is a bun in your oven or when it started baking.

Oh, isn’t it just lovely how you have cut the waiting period by infusing extremely important pieces of information in the news bulletin by telling the viewers that you have just eight months and 30 days to go.

“Reports by Kenya’s medical experts reveal that pregnant women, even those who conceived yesterday like me, face numerous dangers…,” you tell viewers who just want to know less-important things like whether the multi-trillion shilling railway line will be built before Kenya turns 100.

Those of you who already have children extend useless information platforms to the social media and when their toddlers are unwell, they are not taken to see the doctor.

Their sicknesses are announced on news media and the mothers gain loads of sympathy which probably makes the children feel better.

That is probably what Kenya’s modern lifestyle doctors ordered. It must be called e-medicine.

That is not all…