Pot calling kettle black.

I hadn't read today's Standard when I wrote this. But taking off from my previous lament, it is astonishing the self-interest of the media houses isn't obvious to them. Their argument seems to be that reduction in advertising by the Government would amount to muzzling the media. Specious, frivolous and hypocritical are adjectives that spring rapidly to mind. The county government nawabs wringing their hands over the unconstitutionality of the move to direct all advertising to a government advertising agency is just the political football the president did not need to play with CORD making it clear that Saba Saba is happening, come hell or high water and that CORD is the hell and the high water. Governors and their minions will do what governors and their minions do.

The hypocrisy of the media houses, however, is a different kettle of fish. First, many of them have made hundreds of millions of shillings of selling advertising space to the Government. Indeed, Wednesdays seem as if they are dedicated to running government ads. Full-page multi-page colour adds that make the managing editors of newspapers smile like Cheshire cats. And this space is occupied by the two newspapers whingeing the loudest: the Daily Nation and the Standard. It is not the assault on media freedom that is driving them to editorial apoplexy; it is the potential loss of hundreds of millions of Government ad shillings that is agitating them.

Second, the Cabinet Secretary for Information, Communications and Technology is not saying that there will be no advertising in the traditional media by the government; all he is saying is that in the desire of the Government to cut down on expenditure - something the media houses supported when it revolved around mass-sackings and salary-cuts - the Government must rationalise how much it spends on advertising. What is good for the goose is good for the gander; if the Government is going to spend less on the men and women who make it run, it is only right that this amount be reduced in all areas of operation, and advertising is one of them especially in the age of FM radio, the internet and a liberalised broadcast market.

Third, the Consumer Federation of Kenya (COFEK) is the one the makes the best argument against centralising messaging, though it is still a flawed argument. When it argues that moving all government advertising online will have adverse impacts on those who do not have access to the internet, it assumes that online advertising will be an exclusive means of communicating the message. This is not what the Cabinet Secretary has said; all he is saying is that the amount that the Government devotes to ads should not be spent in one, or in this case, two, baskets.

The Daily Nation and the Standard have been snuffling at the trough of government ad largesse for far too long. They have effectively cornered the market between the two of them, with the "smaller" newspapers getting the equivalent of table scraps. Their patently avaricious self-interest in the death of Fred Matiang'i's government ad agency would be laughable if it wasn't for the power of the editorial message of government overreach that the two are pushing for all it is worth.