Feeding off Each Other: Journalistic Role Negotiations Between Local and Foreign Reporters in Nairobi

ABSTRACT

Nairobi, a vibrant hub for international journalism in East Africa, hosts a varied mix of foreign and national reporters. This paper centres on the interplay between these groups and how their relationships impact their professional role conceptions and performance. It is based on 35 interviews—with Kenyan journalists, media critics and foreign correspondents—and ethnographic data collected in Nairobi in 2021. Findings show that journalists working in Nairobi sometimes understand their job as trying to compensate for the professional roles that their counterparts cannot fulfil—like being a watchdog or disseminator. Foreign correspondents are aware of criticism toward stereotypical representations of Africa in the news media and carefully consider their performances to try to circumvent these, whilst national journalists often motivate their reporting to offer counter-narratives. While at first glance the interaction between these groups is minimal, I pose that it is precisely the constant awareness of each other’s work that generates manifold tensions that, in turn, reflect on their roles and practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Journalistic roles
• international news hub
• foreign correspondents
• Kenya
• Kenyan journalists
• Afro-pessimism

Introduction

Nairobi is a regional hub for journalism in East Africa. The Kenyan capital hosts a varied mix of national and foreign reporters, stringers, freelancers, and fixers. Vibrant and powerful national media houses have their headquarters in the city, which are generally described as more robust, sophisticated, and innovative than in the rest of the continent (Ismail and Deane 2008; Ogola 2011). In addition, Nairobi is also a centre from which a myriad of foreign correspondents and international news outlets cover the entire region (von Naso 2018). Whilst the number of foreign correspondents worldwide has been on a stark decline for the last couple of decades (Sambrook 2010), by January 2024, a total of 29 international media houses are registered as operating in the country, according to the Media Council of Kenya’s (n.d.) website.

The work of foreign correspondents in Kenya has garnered some scholarly attention (e.g., Bunce 2010; Nothias 2016; 2020), and so has that of Kenyan journalists (inter alia, Ireri 2017; Maweu 2014; Wasserman and Maweu 2014). There is still room, however, to explore the intersections and interactions between these actors, which this article does. By combining in-depth interviews with participant observation, I centre on the interplay between national and foreign journalists based in Nairobi. Specifically, I seek to answer how their relationships (or lack thereof) impact their professional role conceptions and performance. The study is anchored in an understanding of journalistic roles as discursively constructed (Hanitzsch and Vos 2017). Simply put, the roles of journalists are constantly negotiated, reinterpreted, and contested as reporters, editors, news organisations, and other actors talk about and practice them.

Partly, these role negotiations among foreign and Kenyan journalists circle around the notion of Afro-pessimism, which relates to the stereotypical media representations of Africa in the West (e.g., Nothias 2018). Correspondents are aware of this long-standing criticism and thus carefully consider their performance to try to circumvent it, whilst national journalists often motivate their reporting to offer counter-narratives. The coming section thus provides a literature review which focuses on Afro-pessimism, the changing landscape of foreign correspondence, and journalism in Kenya. Thereafter, a theoretical account of journalistic roles and how this informs the analysis of my interview and observation findings will be provided.

Finally, I offer insight into how national and foreign journalists working in the Kenyan capital feed off each other and how, in turn, this reflects on their role conceptions and performance. The enhanced contact between foreign and national, Western and non-Western journalistic actors magnifies what Mohammed (2022, 9) called the “everydayness of colonization,” where colonial values continue to be deeply ingrained in the way these journalists think and act, as will be further explored throughout the findings section. Because, even if at first sight the interaction between these two broad groups is minimal, I argue here that the constant awareness of each other and their work generates interesting dynamics that have an impact on how journalists report on elections and terrorism to their respective media and audiences.

Nairobi, the News Hub

Aside from episodic incidents of electoral violence and the occasional terror attack, Kenya is a relatively stable country, especially compared to the several conflict-torn neighbouring states. This makes it a suitable location for the international news media to set camp in its capital city, Nairobi, to cover the entire region (von Naso 2018). As elucidated by writer Binyavanga Wainaina (2012) in an oft-cited satirical article,

Nairobi is a good place to be an international correspondent. There are regular flights to the nearest genocide, and there are green lawns, tennis courts, good fawning service.

A handful of agenda-setting newspapers, especially from the United States and the United Kingdom, still have people in Nairobi. Several news wire agencies and transnational broadcasting networks—Reuters, Associated Press, Agence France Press, Al Jazeera, CNN, China Global Television Network—also boast a large presence in the Kenyan capital, and their teams are comprised of a mix of international journalists and locally-hired reporters (Bunce 2010). In 2018, BBC launched a state-of-the-art facility in Nairobi, which is currently the corporation’s largest bureau outside the UK (BBC 2018).

The large presence of foreign journalists in the city, however, does not necessarily translate into extensive and high-quality coverage of the country and the rest of the region. Language, vastness, lack of press freedom and logistical barriers are some reasons presented why the international press fails to deliver quality reporting of Africa (Sambrook 2010, 82). Indeed, it is not uncommon for one single reporter, often sitting in Nairobi or Johannesburg, to cover the over 40 countries that make up the entire sub-Saharan Africa (von Naso 2018).

The Enduring Myth of Afro-pessimism

The news reporting of Africa in the West has been criticised for being primarily negative, stereotypical, and reductive; based on stories of famine, poverty, chaos, and war (inter alia, Bunce 2010; Bunce et al., 2016; Scott 2017; von Naso 2018; Wahutu 2017). This observation is often referred to as Afro-pessimism and has increasingly advanced from academic circles around postcolonial theory and cultural studies to public debates, popular culture, and social media (Nothias 2018). According to Bunce (2010, 498), the reporting of the Kenyan post-electoral violence in 2007/2008 constitutes an “archetypical example” of this, “frequently presenting the complex political, economic and cultural crisis as a bloody and inevitable tribal clash.”

An extensive body of research on news values has well established that news, in general, tends to focus on negativity not only in Africa but the rest of the world (e.g., Harcup and O’Neill 2017). Far from pointing out that news is meant to be only about positive coverage, scholarship on the negative coverage of Africa indicates that foreign coverage of the continent is more negative compared to other regions of the world. However, following a scoping review that studied Africa’s media representation in the United Kingdom and the United States between 1990 and 2014, Scott (2017) called the Afro-pessimistic narratives a “myth” and suggested that there is insufficient empirical evidence to take this criticism for granted. Existing research has found Afro-pessimistic reporting in a small number of elite publications in the coverage of a few specific events in a reduced number of countries in Africa (Scott 2016, 44). These debates thus foreground that it might be reductive to assume there is one single representation of the African continent in the Western news media, which has certainly been depicted in “diverse and multifaceted” ways (Bunce 2016, 18). Yet the fact that it is elite publications, who are agenda setters with a global presence, that often publish Afro-pessimistic coverage makes this discussion relevant. Furthermore, while there have been attempts at offering less stereotypical representations of a range of subject matters (Bunce, Franks, and Paterson 2016) and the use of language related to “tribalism” and “darkness” might not be as pervasive as some might think (Nothias 2018, 1153), overall the international news media coverage continues to be shaped by “pre-existing, often colonial” views of “Africanness” (Nothias 2014, 335).

At any rate, these discussions continue to be central to journalism in Africa. Foreign correspondents working in the region are mostly aware of the criticism and their potential contribution to a negative representation of the continent and thus choose different strategies to somewhat combat it, a phenomenon that Nothias (2020) has labelled “postcolonial reflexivity.” At the same time, Kenyan national journalists have taken it upon themselves to challenge these negative and stereotyping narratives (Bunce 2010). As will be further outlined in the findings section, this awareness and understanding of Afro-pessimism in part shapes how local and foreign journalists negotiate their professional roles.

The Changing Landscape of Foreign Correspondence

Due to the shrinking budgets of news outlets, foreign bureaus in Africa and elsewhere have continued to shut down (Bunce 2011; Sambrook 2010). This does not necessarily mean that foreign correspondence is in danger of extinction, but rather that there is a need to move past the fixed image of this group and acknowledge a new, more diverse landscape with several different actors filling the gap (Bunce 2011; Hamilton and Jenner 2004). Foreign correspondents are traditionally portrayed as “an elite breed of journalists from the West” who “globe-trot through exotic lands of difference and danger” (Bunce 2011, 4). International newsgathering nowadays is much more complex than that.

To begin with, big newswire agencies and international networks are depending less on Western hires to fill their newsrooms and relying more on local journalists, born in the country that they report on, whilst editorial and managerial positions still tend to belong to foreigners (Bunce 2010). Moreover, because there is less budget for as many permanent positions as before, now outlets depend more on freelancers, stringers, and parachute journalists, who fly in only to cover major events (Hamilton and Jenner 2004). Additionally, the demand for fixers—locally based media workers who help international journalists arrange interviews, build contacts, translate, and navigate diverse geographical and cultural terrains—is on the rise (Palmer 2020, 1).

This complex mosaic partly blurs the boundaries between what can be considered local and foreign, and many of those involved have liminal positions. In this sense, holding on to clear-cut divisions between what is Western and non-Western when talking about the international news media landscape is quite reductive (Palmer 2020, 6). Participants of this study include Nairobi-educated journalists working for foreign outlets and multiple Kenyan journalists trained in Europe or the United States working for Kenyan national newspapers. Yet regardless of their identities and/or educational backgrounds, these journalists mostly continue to adhere to in-house rules and editorial practices of the news organisations that they work for (e.g., Arregui Olivera 2023; Bunce 2010). In this sense, and despite some of these tensions, I use the terms foreign correspondents and Kenyan (or local, or national) journalists, to indicate the type of news outlet each of these individuals works for. For the most part, however, I just refer to journalists in Kenya when I group them all.

The Kenyan News Media Landscape

The multiple actors of international journalism based in Nairobi also coexist with the vibrant and innovative national news media landscape of Kenya, adding yet another layer to the news hub label. Despite its regional status as a booming industry, Kenyan journalism does not come without its share of challenges (Ogola 2011). Comprised of a mix of state-owned, privately owned and community outlets (Obuya 2021, 6), the Kenyan media landscape is however dominated by a few private corporations, including the Nation Media Group and The Standard Group. There is an unhealthy level of media concentration, as most outlets are owned by only a few media conglomerates and many of these companies have a presence across print, TV, radio, and online platforms (Obuya 2021). Additionally, press freedom is somewhat compromised: politicians and their allies own some key media houses, the government is a major advertiser, and regulations have curtailed part of the media autonomy (Nyanjom 2012).

The relationship between the print media landscape in Kenya and the state has always been “complex and problematic” (Nyabola 2018, 51), shifting from antagonistic to cooperative relationships at different points in time. To better grasp this context, Kenya’s news media history can be classified into three main stages: a colonial era, a post-independence era and a multi-party era that started in the early 1990s (Ireri 2012). Several news media organisations were established during the colonial era by elites within each racial group at the time—broadly European, Asian, Arab, and African—as a vehicle to shape public opinion and forward specific politico-economic interests (Musandu 2018). Then, following independence in 1963, the news media aligned with the government in the nation-building project and followed the development journalism model, prioritising narratives of national unity over any contentious issues (Ogola 2011). In 1991 Kenya became a multi-party state and during the “democratization years” the news media regained some independence and left development journalism behind (Nyabola 2018, 53).

The aftermath of the 2007 presidential elections in Kenya was characterised by episodes of localised violence that resulted in 1,000 deaths and thousands of internally displaced people. The national and local news media were partly blamed for adding fuel to the fire by using incendiary language, and since there has been an emphasis on training journalists on how to report in ways to avoid further violence and retaliation (e.g., Arregui, Thomas, and Kilby 2020, 3–4). These practices often lead to a culture of restraint in the name of the public good, which can be deemed strategic silencing (Donovan and Boyd 2019) or ethical self-censorship (Fedirko 2020). Kenyan journalists thus often find themselves in a delicate balance between trying to uphold the watchdog with more interventionist roles (Arregui Olivera 2023). Findings from a survey with 504 Kenyan journalists revealed that they consider “providing citizens with information” as the most important role (61.3%), followed by “advocate for social change” (51.7%), “support official policies” (46.9%), “motivate people to participate in civic activities” (45.6%) and, with 35.3%, “act as a watchdog of government” (Ireri 2017, 1042). The Worlds of Journalism Study, based on surveys with 27,500 journalists from 67 countries, places Kenya in the collaborative realm, where journalists see themselves as partners of authorities rather than as a monitor to hold the power to account, and right in between the interventionist and accommodative roles, which distinguish whereas journalistic content is seen as a service for the audiences or as desired by them (Hanitzsch et al. 2019, 182). In contrast, the United States and the United Kingdom, both referent countries in the Western media tradition, are more aligned towards the monitorial and accommodative roles (Hanitzsch et al. 2019, 182).

It is in this complex and multi-layered landscape that this paper is placed. I argue that Nairobi, as an international news hub, is a liminal space in which foreign and local journalists, as well as other related actors, interact and are aware of each other’s work and thus their professional roles are often subject to renegotiation.

Journalistic Roles as Discursively Constructed

The professional identity of journalists is guided by the set of roles that they relate to. When talking about journalistic roles, we refer to both the “normative and descriptive elements” that define the profession’s larger place in society and the “formal and informal rules” for how to fulfil these functions in practice (Hanitzsch and Örnebring 2019, 107). Reporters, editors, news organisations and other institutions are in constant negotiation about what the desired roles of journalists are. In this regard, roles are discursively constructed, because they exist as we talk about and practice them (Hanitzsch and Vos 2017). Journalistic roles are thus never static but rather “fluid” and “dynamic” (Mellado 2020, 4) and journalists tend to endorse multiple of these roles at once, which are not always in harmony with each other (Hanitzsch and Örnebring 2019). For this matter, journalistic roles cannot be discussed outside of organisational, political, or cultural contexts (Mellado 2020).

Researchers have been studying the roles of journalists for over fifty years (e.g., Cohen 1963; Johnstone, Slawski, and Bowman 1972; Weaver et al. 2007; Weaver and Wilhoit 1986; 1996). This body of research has dealt with role classifications including the disseminator, interpreter, adversarial and public mobiliser. More recently, however, scholars have started to make the distinction between the different dimensions of journalistic roles, as these do not only include the norms and values of journalists but also their practices. In other words, there is a clear distinction between role conceptions, namely the “ideals of what it is important to do,” and role performances or enactments, that deal with behaviours and practice (Mellado 2015, 596).

The relationship between these dimensions is far from straightforward. The output of journalists does not always live up to their values and ideas, in part because their work is subject to several levels of influence, from routines and editorial guidelines to the political, cultural, and societal context in which the journalist operates (see Hanitzsch and Mellado 2011). Consequently, some researchers have concentrated on studying the gap between ideals and practices (inter alia, Mellado and van Dalen 2014; Tandoc, Hellmueller, and Vos 2013) whereas others have shifted the focus to investigate the performance of journalistic roles as manifested in journalistic output (e.g., Mellado 2015; 2020). To combine these different dimensions, Hanitzsch and Vos (2017) have proposed a process model of journalistic roles. According to them, roles are divided into two levels: orientations, which include normative and cognitive roles, and performance, encompassing practised and narrated roles.

Research on journalistic roles has often recurred to comparing differing media systems (Hallin and Mancini 2004) in cross-cultural research projects (e.g., Hanitzsch et al. 2019; Mellado 2020; Weaver and Willnat 2012). Grossly summarising, survey-based studies have suggested that the watchdog and disseminator roles usually dominate in the liberal model, whilst the loyal-facilitator role is more prevalent in emerging democracies and transitional settings (Mellado et al., 2020a, 68). But, when centring on the big picture, a lot of the details and nuances of specific contexts are overlooked. In the case of Kenya, as the previous section briefly touched upon, journalists claim the disseminator role to be the most important one paired with a long tradition of interventionism and advocacy for social change (Ireri 2017), which is consistent with shared models of journalism in Africa where these roles developed from the need to free themselves from their colonial pasts (Skjerdal 2012, 641).

Instead of focusing on the breadth of comparing different contexts, in this paper, I zoom into the specific setting of Nairobi as an international news hub. Due to the coexistence and interaction of a multiplicity of actors generating journalistic content in this city, that come from and report for a wide variety of contexts, I see it as a space that triggers the blending and hybridisation of roles (Mellado 2020). Whilst others have studied role performance as “materialised in the final news outcome” (Mellado et al., 2020b, 46), I investigate the earlier stages of the news production process in their specific practices and routines, both as observed in the newsroom and as narrated by the journalists themselves.

Methodology

My analysis is based on 35 in-depth, semi-structured interviews and ethnographic data collected in Nairobi in 2021 as part of a larger research project interested in the coverage of electoral conflict and terrorism in Kenya by the legacy news media.

Interviewees were selected via purposive sampling, based on their “experience” in the “central phenomenon” being explored (Creswell and Plano Clark 2010, 112). Participants include 15 Kenyan reporters and 10 editors who work for the Daily Nation or The Standard—the two largest daily newspapers in the country—and The East African, a weekly publication catering to the whole region that also belongs to the Nation Media Group. Additionally, I interviewed three media critics—which include former journalists, commentators, and political analysts—who were selected as they frequently write and contribute to these news outlets in the sample. Lastly, four foreign correspondents who work for legacy newspapers in the United States and the United Kingdom were included. These countries are regarded as key referents in Western media tradition, and both exert an important influence in Kenya. The US has been a strong political and economic ally since independence and, currently, is leading the “war on terror” against al-Shabaab. The UK is the former colonial power in the country. Additionally, a few legacy newspapers from these states are amongst the few that still can afford to have foreign correspondents in Nairobi or sub-Saharan Africa more broadly, meaning they report on Kenyan affairs regularly.

Interviews lasted between 20 and 100 min. Fifteen took place online via Zoom, and the remaining 20 were face-to-face in Nairobi. Nine of the participants are female, the remaining 26 are male. They also ranged in age and years of experience in journalism, from their mid-twenties to near retirement. Questions centred on the background of each participant, the norms and values of journalism that they uphold, the interplay between national and foreign reporters, and the constraints and limitations that they find in their practice. Furthermore, participants reconstructed the production processes of some of their articles related to electoral violence and terrorism. Doing so allowed to “illuminate aspects” that cannot be detected either in the output or in observing their practice (Reich and Barnoy 2020, 967). Bringing back the process model of journalistic roles, this method allows access to the narrative performance of reporters; what they say they have done (Hanitzsch and Vos 2017).

Additionally, participant observation was carried out over 24 days in Nairobi in July 2021. This method involves spending “time in the field, observing and talking to journalists as they go about their daily tasks and documenting their professional practices and culture” (Cottle 2007, 4–5). Accordingly, I spent one week at the Daily Nation, another week at The Standard, and a few days following a foreign correspondent. My participation included accompanying journalists in their reporting, joining daily planning meetings, having access to editorial guidelines and other documents related to newsroom strategy, and digitally observing conversations on WhatsApp groups that reporters use for work. While immersed in these observations, I systematically recorded what I saw, did, and experienced via daily systematic fieldnotes thus creating a written record to be later analysed (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2011). Once all interviews and observations were completed, a thematic analysis was done on all data gathered—in the form of interview transcripts and fieldnotes. This method of analysis is suitable for identifying, examining, and grouping certain themes and patterns of meaning found in the data (Braun and Clarke 2006).

One of the limitations in my data is that, despite the multiple actors taking part in news production processes in Nairobi as described in the literature review, I only interviewed and observed staff from a handful of national and foreign newspapers. Moreover, I only included foreign correspondents working for outlets based in the United States and the United Kingdom. There is also a stark imbalance between the number of national and foreign journalists that I talked to. These limitations are because the data was gathered for a larger project in which these sampling considerations made better sense. This group of participants is not fully representative of Nairobi as an international news hub. However, the purpose of the paper is to shed light on the role negotiations in these hybrid contexts that then would need to be further explored, potentially also in news hubs in other parts of the world.

In the coming sections, I outline the few instances in which foreign and national journalists collaborate and how they sometimes play complementary roles, followed by an account of how an awareness of Afro-pessimism shapes the way that journalists in Kenya think about how to report on certain issues. To identify interview fragments, I use the code “KJ” to refer to Kenyan journalists, “FC” for foreign correspondents and “MC” for media critics, followed by a number assigned to each participant. The excerpts that come from my fieldnotes are also explicitly identified and are anonymized when needed to protect the identity of my participants.

Parallel Worlds, Complementary Roles

I have indicated that Nairobi is an international news hub where multiple local and international actors of journalism feed off each other. However, on a day-to-day basis, there does not seem to be much interaction or collaboration between those who work for national and foreign news outlets. As expressed by one participant:

International journalists are part of the ex-pat community in Nairobi, [which] seems to be very privileged. (…) You look at where their offices are, where they live, they are very removed from the everyday experiences of your local journalists. (MC-2)

Along similar lines, a Kenyan journalist commented that despite having the contact information of “a number” of foreign correspondents, they do “not meet” frequently because, often, they are “not interested” in the same stories (KJ-13). The same journalist explains that if any given day you look at the Daily Nation, the bulk of their reporting “would interest a Kenyan audience more than they would interest a foreign audience” (KJ-13). This is what most participants focused on when comparing the national and international news media, that they work for different audiences. This general lack of direct interaction, however, does not mean that these journalists are not aware of each other and their output.

Sometimes, one journalist asserted, Kenyans get frustrated with how the international press reports on their country because they do not understand the audience that these stories are geared towards (KJ-13). However ambiguous this notion of a “foreign audience” might be, how journalists perceive their public partly shapes their news choices and thus impacts media representations. By interviewing foreign correspondents in Kenya and South Africa, Nothias (2016, 74) found that they mostly refer to their audience “back home” in four ways: as the family member or layperson, as the tourist, as the businessman and as the politician or decision maker. The situation has, nonetheless, changed. A few years ago, the readers of a foreign newspaper that covered Africa were only those that the publication could reach. Nowadays, the “domestic audience can read your copy, because it will be on the internet” (FC-2). And thus, ideas about who the audience is are clearly expanding. By looking at the Twitter accounts of some foreign correspondents, most of their followers come from the African country in which they are based, before the followers in their home country; and for this matter, local voices “are increasingly heard and take part in shaping the narratives” about their country and continent (Nothias 2016, 78).

Therefore, the audiences of the international and Kenyan news media are starting to overlap more than in the past. It is worth keeping in mind, however, that when we talk about “local” audiences in these cases, it is mostly a privileged group of Kenyans. Those who

follow The New York Times [and] The Washington Post [are] people that have access to the internet, these are people who are educated, these are people who follow subscriptions (…) and they really care about how this information is relayed to the world. (FC-3)

Furthermore, it is worth remembering that newspapers in Kenya are also catering mostly to urban elites and that social media, especially Twitter, remains a niche platform (Nyabola 2018).

Aside from the partial overlap of audiences, general elections and terrorism in Kenya are among the topics that get a lot of attention from the international and national press alike. When interaction between Kenyan and foreign journalists operating in Nairobi occurs, it is in the coverage of these topics. For example, a Kenyan journalist who specialises in the reporting of crime and terrorism explains that “most of those foreign correspondents” rely “on us the local journalists, because we are more networked if compared to them” (KJ-1). On the one hand, Kenyan journalists help foreign correspondents reach out to sources or provide certain background or context information that can help them in their coverage. On the flip side, journalists working for the international press often get easier access to other “news sources that Kenyan journalists struggle to, or news sources that are more likely to dismiss Kenyan journalists” but do “speak to foreign journalists who are seen as having more power” (MC-3). Several participants are of the impression this tends to be the case with official sources and authorities—which are sometimes hard to access for the national press.

During my participant observation, I witnessed a Kenyan reporter working for foreign media trying to interview a high-ranked police officer.

When [the journalist] says that [they] work for [legacy international newspaper], I see how the face of the officer lightens, he shows surprise and acknowledgement. (Fieldnotes, Nairobi, 10.07.2021)

Whether the reaction I observed came from a place of pride, recognition of the capacity of this reporter to speak back to a mainly international audience, or something else, the case remains that this interaction led the journalist to obtain usually hard-to-access official statements on an ongoing investigation. On that day, this journalist was following a story about two presumably kidnapped young kids that was trending on Twitter and had also garnered the attention of several local news outlets. After some hours of reporting and police investigation, it was established that the kids, after all, had been reunited with their mother, and it was an aunt who had taken them. I asked the journalist if they were planning to run the story.

At this point, and especially if the kids are fine, there is no story to write for [international news outlet]. (…) But [they] also talk to [reporter] from [Kenyan news outlet], who says [they] will still write a story, as there has been so much comment and sharing on the case on social media that the Kenyan audience deserves to know what happened. (Fieldnotes, Nairobi, 10.07.2021)

This case further highlights how the types of events that are newsworthy depend on the audience an outlet caters for. In this instance, it was the national outlet that published the article instead of the international one. However, on other occasions, the Kenyan media cannot publish certain stories due to commercial or political interests and, in those cases, the foreign media have the resources to get that information out: “Their hands might not be tied like in our case” (KJ-13). And this is when the “symbiotic” relationship between these two groups, which often seem to live in parallel worlds, becomes evident and relevant (FC-3). In such situations, Kenyan outlets depend on foreign media coverage:

[When] we locally have an issue where we think we can’t really touch (…), you'd rather have a correspondent from a foreign media covering it. Then, now you are covered to quote “according to, for example, the Associated Press” (…). So, in that way, you cover your butt in one way or another. (KJ-1)

Conversely, the Kenyan news media sometimes also becomes a source for foreign correspondents. Some of the journalists I talked to explained that “reliable” local media outlets play “a big role” because as one single correspondent, “you cannot be everywhere” (FC-4). Reading the Kenyan news “every day” is thus part of reporters working for the foreign media’s routine (FC-2).

Distance and proximity also play a role in what and how journalists report. For instance, covering crises and violence in your home country, as opposed to somewhere else, influences the journalists’ practice (Kotisova 2017). In the case of Kenya, ethnicity plays a key role in how journalists cover politics and elections, and previous research has illustrated the tensions that arise between ethnic identity and journalistic norms like accuracy, independence, truth, and accountability (Wasserman and Maweu 2014). One of the journalists I interviewed explicitly reflected on this:

There’s internal bias because I’ve grown up in a [family from a specific ethnic group], yeah? And I saw myself covering the last election, whereby (…) I had a preferred candidate at that time (…) probably influenced by my tribe (…). And that’s where foreign correspondents actually play a very big role. A foreign correspondent in this case has no feelings. (FC-3)

In this case, the journalist saw their personal background and investment in the issues at hand as detrimental to the job. Other times, however, a deep knowledge of the Kenyan context becomes an asset. And, for that matter, a few participants pointed out that foreign and local-national reporters can play “complementary roles,” highlighting the need for more collaboration (KJ-13; FC-3).

In sum, on the few occasions that Kenyan and international journalists collaborate, they manage to compensate for each other. Whilst reporters working for foreign outlets can fulfil the role of watchdog when national journalists feel constrained from doing so due to political or economic influences (see Arregui, Thomas, and Kilby 2020), Kenyan journalists are more thorough in the disseminator role and can act as sources of information to cover foreigners’ blind spots.

Countering Stereotypical Views

Foreign correspondents based in Nairobi cover Kenya and the entire region. Consequently, these journalists usually do not have time to report in-depth on every topic. Additionally, as addressed in the previous section, they need to keep in mind who their content is catered for, and what the usual frames likely to be published in the outlets they work for are:

For a British newspaper, the former colonial power, you're looking at things through a certain prism, that might not be shared by locals. So, sometimes there is that tension. (FC-2)

Because of this, foreign correspondents are often “frustrated” that they need to simplify, for example, an African election into easy binaries (FC-2). And so, “they get a very small, tiny space” to explain “really complex issues” (MC-3). Some of these correspondents are aware that these simplifications can sometimes lead to negative, stereotypical, and Afro-pessimistic representations:

I get the anger at the way in which stories are simplified. (…) Yes, the international press is guilty of that. (…) I mean, it is part of the nature of foreign correspondence. (FC-1)

Another participant admitted that the usual pitfalls include trying to draw attention to the past (e.g., always referring to the violence of 2007 or previous terrorist attacks) and the general lack of local voices in the stories published (FC-4). This awareness and worry create a disposition among multiple international journalists to think of potential strategies to combat these narratives, a process that Nothias (2020) has called “postcolonial reflexivity.”

But these ideas of Afro-pessimism are also central to understanding how Kenyan journalists view their foreign counterparts. For instance:

The projection [of Kenya in] the West is always prejudicial, as a dark place, backwards. (…) While I do not appreciate the way we are portrayed, I wouldn't say it's a problem unique to Kenya. That's a general problem. (KJ-5)

These statements resonate with previous research in Kenya, where journalists have critiqued the Western news media for their stereotypical and reductive coverage of atrocities in Africa such as the Darfur crisis or the genocide in Rwanda (Wahutu 2017, 922). Several of my participants refer to specific incidents to exemplify this, like when CNN labelled Kenya a “hotbed of terror” ahead of the Obama visit in 2015 (Nothias and Cheruiyot 2019), or when The New York Times published gory pictures of victims following the Dusit attack (Takenaga 2019). In both instances, there was a social media uproar among Kenyan journalists and citizens with trending hashtags like #SomeoneTellCNN and #SomeoneTellNYTimes that led to the outlets having to respond with an apology from CNN and an explanation from the NYT.

Some participants acknowledge that they have, with time, understood that often these “misrepresentations” are not “deliberate” and that foreign journalists see things “through their own perspectives” and are generally “ignorant” of the culture the same way a Kenyan journalist would be if suddenly sent to report to the other side of the world (KJ-5). Certainly, one’s social position and context “should be presumed to affect” how journalists will view, understand, and thus report on a given event (Wahutu 2017, 920).

At the same time, a few interviewees recognise that

to an extent, the coverage of the international media (…) has an effect on how the Kenyan media then covers, eh, the [same] story, from then henceforth. (KJ-9)

Continuing with the same example from CNN, a journalist mentioned how that story fuelled “even more patriotic” stories from the local news media, that saw Obama’s visit as a “euphoric moment” of what “many in Kenya consider a son coming back to the country,” a “huge significant visit of the first sitting American president coming to Kenya” (KJ-9). Euphoric narratives of the first president from the United States visiting the country are to be expected, and US-American presidential trips in general garner extensive national and international media attention. But what the statement above illustrates is how at least some Kenyan journalists made intentional decisions on which narratives to perform in the reporting of this case to contest the coverage from CNN.

The loyal-facilitator journalistic role involves being loyal to those in power and offering a positive image of one’s nation (Mellado 2020). These can be seen as two different performances of the same role. Sometimes, these two dimensions go together. For example, in the coverage of terror attacks on Kenyan soil, some journalists expressed that when it comes to national security, becoming a “part of the fight” (KJ-9) and assisting the authorities in their efforts to unite the nation is their journalistic duty and being “patriotic” takes precedence over the need to “hold people into account” (KJ-15). This view of the role is consistent with development journalism (Hanitzsch and Vos 2018, 156) which was regularly practiced in Kenya during the nation-building years following independence. But celebration of the nation is not always the same as support for the government. In the case of the example above, Kenyan journalists argue for the need to counter the Afro-pessimistic narratives that they see in the foreign press, and this can sometimes take the shape of celebratory and patriotic accounts of their country. While they thus seem to perform the celebratory dimension of the loyal-facilitator role, it certainly occurs independently from the loyalty towards the powerful. Consequently, breaking up these two dimensions of the role and including one which focuses only on the positive representation of the nation—the patriotic journalistic role—is required in this context.

This patriotic role is a repeated motivation among my participants. Journalists see their own reporting, the rise of media criticism on social media (Nothias and Cheruiyot 2019), and that more Kenyans are now writing for foreign news outlets as specific ways in which they can slowly work on countering Afro-pessimistic narratives—a view that resonates with that of Bunce (2010) and Nyabola (2018). In fact, some see this as their professional goal. During a conversation with a senior editor who had completed their education as a journalist in England, I asked them whether they preferred London or Nairobi:

“Nairobi”, [they] say. And then corrects [themself]: “Africa”. [The editor] says [they] could also be based in Lagos or Pretoria, but that [they] want to tell the African story in a better way. I ask: “telling the African story for Africans or for the world?” [Editor] replies that for the whole world. [They] would eventually like to write for a foreign audience too. (Fieldnotes, Nairobi, 13.07.2021)

The need to tell the African story from a different viewpoint is, in part, what has driven a lot of Kenyans to pitch their stories to international news outlets: “I have noticed a lot of new names in journalism, really, really good people writing really good stuff for foreign media” (FC-3). There is also space for this now because most news outlets cannot afford to have full-time foreign correspondents stationed in Nairobi as they did some years ago.

Having capable local voices produce knowledge for an international audience is often surrounded by a celebratory aura. Echoing similar discussions regarding African researchers, belonging to the communities one represents often amounts to a greater level of accountability to use the information for good than when “parachute” scholars or journalists come to collect data or do some reporting and then fly out again (Mohammed 2022, 15). Yet these processes are still mainly embedded in the privileging of Western news organisations’ construction of narratives of Africa for abroad, and these Kenyan journalists still are often constrained by the editors’ decisions and in-house guidelines, thus these journalists’ voices are somewhat silenced from the knowledge construction processes of their own communities (Bunce 2010; Wahutu 2018).

In a nutshell, still, Kenyan journalists usually motivate their own reporting of electoral violence and terrorism to offer counter-narratives to those put forward by the foreign news media. At the same time, they see these same outlets that they challenge as examples of the standard of journalism to strive for:

It’s a way of doing things that has become embedded in the thinking of journalists. (…) This idea that Western reporting is the ideal, you know, that we should do it the way CNN does it. (MC-3)

This attempt at mimicry can certainly be explained by the fact that journalists in Kenya have been mostly trained and educated following mostly British and US American curriculums, even those who stayed home to attend university (see Cheruiyot 2021). The “everydayness of colonization” continues to shape the way African communities continue to think and speak and knowledge produced in the West is still presented as the “default” canon against which they need to compare themselves (Mohammed 2022, 9). Moreover, and part of the argument of this paper, journalists in Nairobi are more exposed to the work of international media than in other places due to its status as a regional news hub, and thus these tensions are accentuated even further. So, while on the one hand journalists in Kenya respect and want to resemble certain international legacy news outlets, they also want to be set apart from them by challenging the traditional ways in which their country has been represented. And so, Kenyan journalists are often in tension about their roles; tensions that in part answer to the post-colonial and globalised legacies described.

Conclusion

This paper set out to explore how the interactions (or lack thereof) between Kenyan and foreign journalists operating in Nairobi partly shape their professional roles. While focusing on the professional collaboration or awareness between these two groups, I illustrate how the roles and perceptions of journalists working in Kenya are deeply influenced by the vibrant and dynamic international hub in which they operate. Although local and foreign journalists do not interact very often with each other, I pointed out a few instances in which they do collaborate. In these situations, they compensate for the roles that others cannot perform. Foreign correspondents can hold the powerful accountable at times when Kenyan reporters are constrained, and local journalists make up for disseminating and providing context in the instances when their international counterparts cannot report.

Furthermore, even when they are working on their separate issues, they are constantly aware of each other’s presence and output. Foreign and national journalists alike are familiar with the criticism of Afro-pessimism and question and position their roles accordingly. Kenyan journalists constantly justify their practices by comparing their work to that of the foreign media. While they recognise international outlets as examples to follow on how to do journalism following the Western canon most of them have been educated in, they intentionally try to offer counter-narratives to the generally stereotypical representations of Kenya abroad. In so doing, they sometimes perform a patriotic and celebratory role.

While the interaction between international and local reporters in Nairobi seems to be minimal, the constant awareness of each other’s work plays a role in how journalists perceive and perform their roles. This article thus has contributed to the growing research on journalistic roles by unpacking the multi-layered tensions that are specific to Nairobi as an international news hub and complicating the understanding of the loyal-facilitator role. In so doing, I also seek to shine a light on the need to explore regional news hubs as liminal and hybrid spaces in which different journalistic cultures meet and interact, thus creating spaces in which role conceptions and performance are constantly renegotiated and contested.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).