Among the key functions of the Media Council are to promote high professional standards amongst journalists as well as to enhance ethical standards among journalists and in the media. The Council’s Media Monitoring Department assesses the performance of different media outlets in the country using the Code of Conduct for the Practice of Journalism as entrenched in the Media Act 2007. Against this benchmark , journalists’ output is monitored, analysed and examined in terms of adherence to the various articles in the Code. The reports on any breaches are used to advise concerned media outlets appropriately in the spirit of self-regulation.
The Media Monitoring Department informs the training department a lot by providing feedback on the status of reporting and coverage of stories by different media outlets.
The Department analyses the reports both qualitatively as well as quantitatively.
Currently, the following media are being monitored:
Print: Daily Nation, The Standard, The Star, The People, Taifa Leo (National News, Provincial/County News, Opinion Pieces)
TV: Citizen TV, NTV, KTN, KBC, K24 (News Bulletins 1.00 PM / 9.00 PM)
Radio: Classic FM, Kiss 100, Citizen Radio, KBC Kiswahili, Ghetto Radio (Breakfast Shows 8.00 – 10.00 AM).
The Monitoring Unit also monitored selected vernacular radio stations, especially focusing on the coverage of the confirmation of charges hearings against six Kenyan suspects at the International Criminal Court at The Hague.
Digital Print Media Monitoring
With assistance from GIZ the Council has procured a print module to monitor print media.
The Print Monitoring System scans newspaper pages, recognises text and imports the scans into the database for further processing. It can also import epapers (pdf) and process them like scanned newspaper pages besides supporting manual cutting of online articles out of online news sites and treating clipped online articles identical to newspaper articles.
In its operations, the system shows highlighted keywords belonging to customer or topic profiles and offers a complex set of clipping tools. The MediaPortal offers a customer-individual presentation of all collected articles, fulltext search, meta data search, creation of individual press reviews and also acts as the internal archive of all articles.
This system has boosted the Council's media monitoring function.
On going Media Monitoring Activities
- Comparative analysis of the size of advert space in newspapers and diversity of news items, top stories, opinion pieces, features e.t.c
- Comparative analysis of advert time vis-à-vis news time in NTV, KTN and Citizen. Focus is on prime time news at 9.00 pm
- Analysis of prime time news in both print and TV on various categories of news i.e. length of the story, current affairs, commentaries, sports, health, locality, sources (rural vis- a- viz urban, corporate, elites)