International Student Interview------What' the Media Like in Your Country?

At lunch, I met up with my friend Cynthia Onyango, who is from Nairobi, Kenya. I asked her to help me with my homework in communications class. We talked about how the media works in America and how different it is in Kenya. Cynthia’s response was different than I thought. She spoke to me about how the United States is a great influence. She believed how the media in Kenya is a melting pot like America, but there are only a couple of differences. The music in Kenya has more drums in the background than what we have in our music. One of the biggest differences is the language is not only in English but in Swahili too.

Cynthia continued to speak about what she first noticed about American media and about our TV programs and movies. She did not like profanity. Cynthia believed we take freedom of the press for granted. She spoke about how we used the freedom of the press to the extreme. To her there was much more violence, profanity, and nudity in our media, and there was no need for them.

We talked about who owned the media in Kenya. She informed me it is mostly private ownership who owned the media. The owners produce programs in English. The government owned one part of the media but, the government programs were entirely in Swahili. Cynthia said, “In the past, the government controlled everything you watched, listened, wrote, or anything one ever did. Now the media has changed to be more like the United States.”

What surprised me was, when I talked to Cynthia, how much it was like ours, but different in another way too. In one way, her media was modern, like ours, but not to the extreme of language, nudity, or violence. I could not believe the government once controlled everything. If the government controlled everything you did, it would be frustrating because one could not make his or hers own choices. The other thing that surprised me was how much she talked about how we used the freedom of the press to the extreme, because I would have never known about it until she mentioned it to me.