A newspaper gains public’s trust only by sticking to truth
Esther Passaris, an aspirant for the Nairobi governor's seat, at the Southern Sun Mayfair Nairobi hotel on August 15, 2016. PHOTO | SALATON NJAU | NATION MEDIA GROUP
What you need to know:
- In outlook, Esther Passaris, Nairobi gubernatorial aspirant, is fetching.
- But this is not a good enough reason for a newspaper to put a non-story about her on page one.
- There must exist pretences that are correct and true and, therefore, desirable.
- Yet never in English language literature have I come across any “true pretences” or “correct pretences”.
As an adjective, the word fetching means “attractive”, especially concerning how a woman is chiselled out and wrapped up. In outlook, Miss Esther Passaris — the former would-be Nairobi mayor — is fetching. But that is not a good enough reason for a newspaper to put a non-story about her on page one.
What compelled the Standard’s editor even to print the headline in red? For, through colour, the editor has gone out of the way to draw the public’s attention to what is really a non-story. In ordinary language, the newspaper has exaggerated.
A newspaper gains the public’s trust only by sticking to the truth as much as it is possible to come face to face with the truth. As New England’s Robert Frost reminds us in poetry criticism, every time you exaggerate in any way in a poem or a newspaper story, you only weaken it.
“Anything more than the truth would have (been) too weak”, writes the famous American in a piece (included in John Ciardi’s celebrated collection How Does a Poem Mean?, which was one of my literature set books as an undergraduate student at Chicago’s Roosevelt University many decades ago).
Yet the Nation found it appropriate not only to put just such an exaggeration on page one but also, even there, to draw attention to it by garnishing it in umpteen ways. But the Swahili — our own national cousins — never cease reminding us that, because kizuri will automatically sell, it never needs to be advertised. Waswahili insist that only kibaya needs kujitangaza.
‘FALSE PRETENCES’
Kibaya can sell only by means of what our court judges and magistrates tautologically claim to be “false pretences”, where the adjective false is completely unnecessary because a pretence can never be anything but false. If the adjective false is possible before the noun pretence, then the opposite must also be possible.
There must exist pretences that are correct and true and, therefore, desirable. Yet never in the English language literature have I come across any “true pretences” or “correct pretences”. Never in all my career as a student and teacher of English, have I come across any pretence that was not false. I stress that if some pretences are not false, they are not in my ken.
My dictionary Collins defines a pretence as “…a claim that could mislead people into believing something which is not true…” But even Collins should be tad more careful because it is possible to utter an untruth — to “mislead people into believing something which is not true…” — without intending it.
When omniscient Rome asserted that the earth’s surface was flat, there was no pretence. There was only ignorance. Official Europe’s heinous crime was that it later murdered millions of human beings merely because these expressed beliefs in direct opposition to the Roman Church’s.
The Swahili, our own our national cousins, never cease reminding us that kizuri chajiuza automatically, and that kibaya is what needs kujitangaza by strutting like a he-tausi every time he espies a peahen.
