President William Ruto has stated that the government will defend media rights as his Cabinet Secretary for Trade, Moses Kuria, continues his assault on journalists.
Speaking in Naivasha, when he flagged off the 2023 WRC Safari Rally on Wednesday, the Head of State said in as much as it was right for the media to call out Kuria, it was also his right and that of like-minded Kenyans to attack the press anytime they are in the wrong.
“We must defend the media, the free media. We must defend their right to criticize, to say whatever they want to say even to write propaganda, even to say the wrong things. We must defend that right.”
“We must also defend the right of those who hold the media to account. When the media goes rogue we must also defend the rights of people like Moses Kuria to speak their mind the same way we are defending the media to say all the things they want to say including the wrong ones,” President Ruto said.
In the same breath, President Ruto defended Moses Kuria saying the media must also be ready to be criticized when people speak up.
“I saw one journalist saying that the President should defend us from Moses Kuria, that’s fine; I will do my bit, but I want to ask them who is going to defend me from rogue media because I go through hell all the time. We need a fair balance,” he added.
“If they are feeling pain about what others say about them, it should tell them that there are people who feel pain when they write falsehoods about others. I hope this enables us to calibrate what we say either way. The central aspect of this is that we must always know that we have a country called Kenya where we all belong and must defend.”
The Trade CS started his attacks on Nation Media Group (NMG), its owner and journalists accusing them of being “an opposition party” before making a roadside declaration directed at government agencies to stop advertising with the media house, failure to which they would be sacked.
He was seemingly responding to an exposé NMG ran over the weekend exposing an oil scandal allegedly orchestrated by his ministry.
Moments after his speech, he went on Twitter to call the media house’s journalists “prostitutes”, angering many Kenyans who deemed it too low and juvenile.
CS Kuria said on Wednesday that he has always been pro-media and has even interacted with media houses, having owned one.
He also cited a quote from Thomas Baldwin’s ‘The Prerogative of the Harlot,’ which he compared to ‘how the media operates in opposition to what true journalism is’.
“I am not apologizing and I have been a media owner before. I have been a writer in your newspapers and all that before,” CS Kuria stated.
“There is nobody who is pro-media more than me but I know the difference between media and what Thomas Baldwin called the prerogative of the harlot; the exercise of power without responsibility.”
