During the heated electioneering period of 2022, Linus Kaikai, the editorial director at Royal Media Services, opened up on the struggles journalists working for Citizen Tv and other media under Royal Media went through following the decision of SK Macharia to openly support Raila Odinga in the 2022 presidential election that took place on August 9..
SK Macharia who is the owner of Royal Media Group had been publicly campaigning for Azimio presidential candidate Raila Odinga who lost to William Ruto.
His media business which includes Citizen Tv, Inooro Tv, and Radio Citizen have faced serious criticism over what many observers have termed as biased media coverage in favour of Raila.
According to Kaikai, SK’s decision to back Raila for the presidency turned Citizen journalists into targets.
“”(RMS) journalists were being profiled as favoring Azimio la Umoja One Kenya Coalition for the simple reason that our chairman and proprietor (SK Macharia) had declared his preference and was actively taking part in the campaigns for Raila Odinga. He had made it very public,” he said.
“We made repeated assertions and gave the public assurances that the position of the chairman doesn’t affect our editorial leaning but it’s not accepted.”
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Kaikai noted that there are instances when journalists from the media house were being asked to remove branding from their microphones and other equipment to avoid detection.
“There is concern about the issue of profiling because these politicians have their supporters. And what they do is they unleash them on our media houses. They unleash them on our specific journalists. It is a security concern for our teams out there because profiling amounts to a green card to supporters to proceed as they may wish. We’ve had to remove our branding from our journalists,” he said.
“So no microphone that shows who we are, because if you proceed with your identity all over the place, you do not know what supporters will do.”
