Take Newsweek’s #MuslimRage debacle from last September. The magazine’s main article about protests over the controversial film Innocence of Muslims, featured a front page with angry men in traditional clothing, under the headline “MUSLIM RAGE.” Newsweek posted a link on their official twitter feed, encouraging their followers to voice their opinions under the hashtag #MuslimRage. And voice them they did:

BURN ALL WESTERN LITERATURE….onto a zip drive so I can listen to it while driving. #MuslimRage

— Qasim Rashid (@MuslimIQ) September 17, 2012

Lost your kid Jihad at the airport. Can’t yell for him. #MuslimRage

— Leila ليلى(@LSal92) September 17, 2012

Not knowing how many cheek kisses are due #muslimrage

— Abrar(@errnooo) September 17, 2012

On the surface, this shows how a carefully planned “social media strategy” can go wrong in an instant. More importantly, it shows that traditional media outlets no longer have as much control over the conversations around their coverage.

Social media and other online platforms give readers the ability to speak out and take part in setting the agenda. The age of user generated content has also ushered in a kind of crowdsourced fact-checking on a massive scale. If a story is being misreported, readers, listeners and viewers can and will let the authors know. Other examples include the huge social media backlash CNN faced over their article on hormonal female voters ahead of the US elections. On a lighter note, viewers lambasted NBC’s shambolic  Olympics coverage through hashtags like #NBCfail and #ShutUpMattLauer.

From the Magazine: Don’t feed the trolls
An anti-Muslim video demonstrated how the politics of fear dominate the online environment. It’s time we took action, argue Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman.

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Perhaps the most encouraging aspect of this development is the platform it has provided for people outside of the western world to speak back against the often simplistic and incorrect way in which their nations and cultures are reported on in international media.

For instance, some journalists are still likely to present African countries as one, exclusively impoverished and backward entity, which is constantly balancing on the brink of war. Alternatively, there is the increasingly popular, but almost equally tedious and one-dimensional “Africa rising” narrative.

In the past, people had few possibilities to respond to such coverage — if it even reached them.  But this has changed with the dawn of the internet. As foreign reporters parachuted in to cover the Kenyan elections in March, an easy go-to story following the crisis of the 2007-2008 vote was that of ethnic tensions and the potential for violence. However, this narrative was undermined the fact that most Kenyans went to the polls peacefully.  Foreign media promptly experienced the full wrath of a well-informed and snarky Kenyan social media population.

The below are only a few examples of the hashtag #PicturesForStuart, aimed at France 24 anchor Stuart Norval, who trailed their Kenya report with a tweet promising “dramatic pictures”:

Armed w/ MACHETE & spoons, Kenyan man destroys a plate of rice! Cc @stuartf24 #PicturesForStuart twitter.com/rimbui/status/…

— rimbui (@rimbui) March 4, 2013

Dramatic picture of clear streets in the Nairobi CBD on election day. flic.kr/p/dZuYK8 #PicturesForStuart #KenyaDecides – @stuartf24.

— ≡ (@wiselar) March 4, 2013

Then there was #SomeoneTellCNN, aimed at a particularly sensationalist CNN report titled “Armed as Kenyan vote nears”, featuring an unknown militia, seemingly consisting of a group of men rolling around in the grass with homemade weapons.  The piece was widely mocked.

This is what @cnni is calling an ‘Armed Kenyan’. Like reallyyyy??? #SomeoneTellCNN twitter.com/EricLatiff/sta…

— Eric Latiff (@EricLatiff) March 1, 2013

#SomeoneTellCNN that we had 2 presidential debates and countless peace rallies that they didn’t cover so they can take their crap elsewhere!

— tinakagia (@tinakaggia) March 1, 2013

There was also the more general #TweetLikeAForeignJournalist:

Kenyans go bananas awaiting election results, and dig in with Passion. Outcome fruitless. #TweetLikeAForeignJournalist twitter.com/MafiaCuckoo/st…

— Faiba Kartel (@MafiaCuckoo) March 5, 2013

#TweetLikeAForeignJournalist Fears as millions fall asleep before final results get released in Kenya. @stuartf24 #SomeOneTellCNN @nimacnn

— Wahura Kanyoro (@wahurakL) March 4, 2013

#TweetlikeAForeignJournalist International observers starry eyed at the goings on of the Kenyan election twitter.com/Frankiewgichur…

— Frankiewgichuru (@Frankiewgichuru) March 4, 2013

The hashtags trended worldwide. This was picked up by Al Jazeera and the Washington Post among others, and prompted CNN to release a statement defending their coverage. Kenyans had successfully turned the lazy journalism into the dominant story. As Africa is the fastest growing smartphone market in the world, over the coming years millions more will get the opportunity to challenge one-dimensional international reporting.

It’s important not to overstate the power of social media. Traditional media still commands the biggest platforms and audiences, and many sensationalist, ignorant or incorrect reports do remain unchallenged. Twitter in itself is not a solution, it is simply a tool. Used correctly, it provides a legitimate possibility for people to collectively raise their voice and be heard. It provides the platform for those on the ground, those in the know and everyone in between to help bring balance and nuance to big news stories. And that is certainly a positive development for freedom of expression.

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There is fear that some East African governments might clamp down on local-language stations in the wake of indictment of a Kenyan journalist by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged crimes against humanity.

Joshua Arap Sang, a broadcast journalist, has become the first media personality to be indicted by the ICC.

Sang was on  15 Dec named alongside six politicians and government officials for having masterminded the 2007-2008 post-election violence.

He is the head of operations at Kass FM, a nascent radio station that broadcasts in the Kalenjin language. The language is spoken in Kenya’s Rift Valley region, where much of the violence took place.

In naming the radio personality as one of the six suspects, the ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said that together with two politicians from the Rift Valley indicted for instigating the violence “Joshua Sang played a crucial part” in coordinating attacks.

Arap Sang, as he is popularly known by his listeners, was, according to the ICC Prosecutor, “involved in planning this operation, collecting supporters and also using coded messages” on radio to plan the violence.

Moments before and after the ICC prosecutor made the indictment, Sang was on air on Kass FM. He responded to the indictment with appeals to his listeners to remain calm, saying he was confident of his innocence.

A disputed election result in late 2007 led to violent attacks in various Kenyan regions, including Kisumu, Mombasa, Eldoret, and the capital, Nairobi. The violence left 1,133 people dead and over 650,000 homeless.

Media observers and monitors singled out certain local-language radio stations for contributing to ethnic animosity through hate speech. The observers noted that some local-language radio stations not only took clear sides supporting leading political parties but also spread fear and propaganda through their programming, slandered individuals and communities and propagated ethnocentrism.

Speaking in Nairobi a few days before the indictment, in an exclusive meeting with journalists working with community and local-language radio stations, which included Sang, Moreno underlined the importance of in the peace process in Kenya, saying the radio stations “have a bigger role than me in dividing or uniting Kenyans.”
Although they were cited for unfair coverage of the election campaigns and the violence that broke out after the contested results were announced, mainstream media seem to agree with others on the role that local-language radio played during the violence.

Earlier in the year Joseph Odindo, editorial director of Nation Media Group, the largest media house in the region, called local-language radio station “poison”. In his view, vernacular radio stations played a role in “fanning the violence” that followed the elections in 2007.

Others in the mainstream media say the naming of Sang as a key suspect in post-election violence should not be taken as an indictment of the Kenyan media in general, but as censure of an individual journalist. The chair of the Editors’ Guild in Kenya, Macharia Gaitho says the indictment of a journalist by the International Criminal Court (ICC) is not a reason to pass judgment on Kenyan media as a whole, which in general acted responsibly in reporting the 2007 general elections and the violence that followed.

Media scholars in the region acknowledge the influence of local-language broadcast radio in a region still plagued by low literacy rates. Dr Levi Obonyo , the head of communications at Daystar University and a council member of the Media Council of Kenya, says that local-language broadcast journalists in Kenya have bigger influence over listeners than your average media personalities.

The indictment of Sang has sent shock waves in the East-African region, which saw a number of media personalities indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda for having participated in the genocide that killed close to a million people in 1994.

In the neighboring Uganda, media commentators hope that Sang’s indictment will not serve as an excuse for the Ugandan Government, which has a history of gagging the media, to roll back media freedoms.

Journalist Benjamin Rukwengye writes that for Uganda, which is in the build up to another divisive election, “every journalist has a role to play in ensuring that the relative media freedom we currently enjoy is augmented, rather than curtailed by a government which will eagerly flaunt Arap Sang as [a point of] reference.”

Ernest Waititu, a native of Kenya, is founder and editor of Afrikanews.org. He first wrote for Index on this topic in Volume 39 Number 2.

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