MEDIA REPORTAGE INFLUENCING TERRORIST ACTIVITIES IN MANDERA COUNTY – KENYA

Description

Media Reportage on Terrorist activities in Mandera County-Kenya is a deeply engrossing book which seeks to delve into the intriguing aspect of both Kenyan and International media reporting on terrorist activities in Mandera County-Kenya. Mandera County is one of the forty-seven counties in Kenya located in the North Eastern Region. The town is bordered by the Federal Republic of Somalia to the East and Ethiopia to the North. It a very vibrant business hub and plays a central role in sustaining livelihoods not only of Kenyans living in Mandera but also Somalis and Ethiopians across the borders. From past research conducted, Mandera County was noted to have a link with almost every terrorist attack that has happened in Kenya, either as a haven for planning these attacks, or as an avenue through which the militants access the Kenyan territory. This assertion can be found in the literature reviewed. The Al-Shabaab militants started conducting attacks in Kenya − especially the IED and VBIED attacks − after the KDF, in defense of the Kenya’s territorial integrity, took the war to Al-Shaabab inside Somalia; this was after a series of sense-baffling kidnappings and other relatively small scale attacks in Lamu County. The largely collaborative operation dubbed Linda Nchi was the turning point where Al-Shaabab openly declared war against Kenya; it is after this blatant and aggressive declaration that a number of deadly attacks were witnessed in Kenya and especially in Mandera County. This book, therefore, seeks to bring to the fore the nature of reporting, the effects and challenges that have arisen as a direct result of the kind of media reportage that both the local and international media accord Mandera County; in order to paint an accurate picture of what transpired, a rather intensive research was conducted to establish how the media reports terrorist attacks in Mandera County. 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 light on how the media, so inadvertently at times, tends to misrepresent facts whenever there is a terrorist act simply because of the intrinsic ‘news value’ and the indisputable emotional sway that a terrorism-based news item carries at its very core.