Andrew Limo
15 September 2007
opinion
Nairobi — Television news coverage in Kenya is taking a new dimension, with video journalists, riding on the crest of digital technology, going to any length to bring "live" coverage of news to the living room.
Recently, a local TV station aired a human interest story on the dilemma a traditional Pokot parent is facing: does he send his children to school or have them help with looking after family livestock.
When the partially blind man desperately pleads with the provincial administration to be allowed to hold back one child to help to "ward off the wolves," having lost to the local school, one is lost as to which situation to empathise with - the family's economic survival or the future of the child the man has refused to surrender to modernity.
I am sure that by the time viewers were being shown an administrative police officer tailing a little girl through the bush and finally "harvesting" (not arresting) her for school, most had forgotten they were watching prime time news.
THE STORY HAD THE ELEMENTS OF drama suspense, action and humour.
Nation Media Group TV network NTV came in with another thriller that was the talk of town and villages the whole of last week.
It was the sad story of a man who had been cuckolding his neighbour, a long-distance driver.
Acting on a tip-off, the man returns home and catches his wife in bed with the neighbour. He locks them in, calls his brother to help him to beat the offender and reportedly also calls the Press to cover the action-packed incident.
Like the earlier one, the NTV story was dramatic and full of action. We saw it all "live" - the beating of the offender, his taking to his heels and his blood-soaked face admitting before the camera that "sin had been committed". When it was all over, a friend of mine was asking for episode two: what happened to the unfaithful wife?
All these episodes remind me of yet another incident captured by Citizen TV a couple of months ago.
A woman is roughing up a computer teacher who is said to have been "messing up" her daughter instead of teaching her how the machine works.
But as we commend the journalists for the good stories and their great sense of spontaneity, do we realise the "breaking news" is made possible by modern technology more than by a cameraman and woman with a nose for hot news?
A few years ago, there were no mobile phones to call a newsroom from a scene of crime.
The driver who found a stranger in his nest would have found it hard to preserve the evidence which he shared with us all.
Firstly, chances are the victims would bolt away as he organised coverage.
Secondly, the task would not be undertaken by a single cameraman, but a host of "hard" journalists (mostly men) carrying bulky equipment that took ages to set up.
The soundman would arrive with a separate recording machine.
The cameraman would need time to warm up the camera and get the environment's right colour temperature, or what you would call "white balancing".
There would also be a producer to coordinate the team and later carry the tapes to the studio for a lengthy editing ritual that involves digitising and voicing.
It now takes an hour or so for a single journalist or even the amateur next door with a small but powerful camera to get the pictures on air.
There are no ceremonies at the scene. All is point and shoot. The camera has what they call the auto white tracking (AWT) that ensures quality even as you point and shoot.
SO THE STORY OF A BURNING HOUSE may be captured in a digital format, compressed and relayed over satellite or even internet using portable gadgets.
The first pictures could compromise on quality, especially if pushed through the Internet, but they would be good enough for the immediacy of breaking news.
The original high-quality material on discs (which are replacing tapes) can be aired later.
This footage is manipulated easily in non-linear editing, in which picture clips are picked randomly on a computer instead of the real time sequencing of the analogue world.
The versatility of technology is demonstrated by British TV networks each year as they cover World War II veterans' day.
Technology has made it possible for us to go "live to Normandy" to watch the vast, empty shoreline as a journalist hysterically tells of the action that took place 65 years ago.
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