PRINT MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE KENYA DEFENCE FORCES’ OPERATION ‘LINDA NCHI’ IN SOMALIA: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF NATION AND THE STANDARD NEWSPAPERS

Description

The book delves into how the Kenyan media covered the operation in the Federal Republic of Somalia. Somalia descended into chaos in 1991 immediately after the fall of Siad Barre, the then President. This was due to the inability to consolidate power due to the prevalence of strong ethnic affiliations. This led to the capture of power from the Government by the Islamic Courts Union. Thereafter, there arose various warlords and clan leaders who perpetuated their Clanism agenda to divide and rule their constituents. In later years around the year 2006, the militia called Al-Shabaab managed to dislodge power and influence from the ICU. This book, therefore, seeks to bring to the fore the partly harrowing and mostly eye-opening experiences that the KDF and the Kenyan media went through in the combat zone, in terms of the actual combat and subsequent news coverage. In order to paint an accurate picture of what transpired, rather intensive research was conducted in Somalia to establish how the media managed to gather their news, and how the ever-spinning Al-Shabaab propaganda machine contributed towards shaping the general perception about the surprisingly protracted war’s intricacies for both the commoner in Somalia and the ever anxious international audience. The book, in a deliberate effort to better arm journalists with the requisite skills and knowledge to better handle terrorism reporting, seeks to further highlight the shortcomings of media policies in the covering of conflict in general, and terrorism in particular and seeks to shed a light on how the media, so inadvertently at times, tends to whip up their audiences’ emotions whenever there is a terrorist act simply because of the intrinsic ‘news value’ and the indisputable emotional sway that a terrorism-based news item on carries at its core.