CPA Enock Monari

Sometime between now and August next year, a clip will land in your WhatsApp group. A familiar politician will appear to say something outrageous. It will look real, it will sound real, and it will arrive without a source. What you do in the next few seconds will matter more than most people realise.

The Media Council of Kenya has published the Guidelines for Election Coverage 2027. Kenyans vote on Tuesday, 10 August 2027, and the campaign period opens on Saturday, 29 May 2027. The document is addressed to journalists and media houses, and I should disclose that I sit on the Council's board. But it is worth the public's attention for a simpler reason. It sets out what you are entitled to expect from the media over the next twelve months, and what to do when you do not get it.

Start with what the guidelines say election coverage is for. It exists to help you make an informed choice at the ballot. That means reporting on manifestos, policy proposals, past records, voter registration and the actual mechanics of voting. The document is explicit that coverage should not disproportionately chase political personalities, rallies, insults and theatrics at the expense of the issues affecting your life. If your evening bulletin is mostly footage of crowds and abuse, that is not a matter of taste. It falls short of the standard the industry has set for itself.

Then there are the labels. Media houses are required to tell you when content has been paid for. Political advertisements must be clearly marked and kept separate from news, sponsors disclosed where the law requires it, and paid political messaging by influencers and online content creators must be declared as sponsored communication rather than dressed up as independent opinion. If a well known personality is suddenly enthusiastic about a candidate, you are entitled to know whether money changed hands.

Artificial intelligence gets its own chapter, and this is the genuinely new ground. Media houses must disclose when AI has materially contributed to what you are reading or watching, a named editor must approve such content before it goes out, and using synthetic tools to fake the identity, voice or likeness of anyone in the election is prohibited outright. Satire and creative work are allowed, but they must be labelled clearly enough that nobody is fooled. A media house that publishes a manipulated clip without saying so is in breach.

Results night has the tightest rules of all. Any preliminary numbers must be labelled unofficial and carry a disclaimer stating that they remain subject to verification by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission. Figures must be checked against official declarations and statutory forms before broadcast. No media house may declare a winner before the Commission does. Live programmes must run on a delay of at least seven seconds so that hate speech or incitement can be cut before it reaches air. If a station calls the presidency ahead of the Commission, it has broken the rules, whatever the arithmetic appears to show.

Opinion polls deserve their own caution. The guidelines require media houses to publish who conducted a poll, who funded it, the sample size, the margin of error and the fieldwork dates. Ask for those five things every time. A poll is a snapshot of opinion at one moment, not a prediction. And the informal material that fills airtime, the vox pops, the SMS votes, the online polls, is not research at all, and must be presented as the casual thing it is.

The document also carries obligations that are easy to overlook until they affect you. Election information should reach people in the languages they actually speak, with sign language interpretation on major election programmes. Children may not be filmed or identified in ways that expose them to harm. Reporting must not blame whole communities for the acts of individuals, and hate speech and incitement are prohibited outright, in advertisements as much as in news. Women candidates, journalists and election officials face disproportionate online abuse, and media houses are expected to document and respond to it rather than amplify it.

When a media house gets it wrong, it must correct the error promptly and with the same prominence as the original mistake, on the same platform. Every media house is expected to run an accessible complaints mechanism and to tell you what it did about your complaint. If that fails, or if you would rather not go through the newsroom at all, you can take the matter directly to the Complaints Commission established under the Media Council Act. That right does not depend on anyone's permission.

None of this settles the WhatsApp problem. The guidelines bind media enterprises and journalists. They do not bind the anonymous account that manufactures the clip, or the uncle who forwards it. Those actors will be busiest precisely when tensions are highest, in the days around the vote and the count. The defence there is ordinary scepticism: check whether an established newsroom has carried it, look for the label, and wait the extra hour before passing it on.

Rules on paper have never protected an election by themselves. They work when enough people know what the standard is and notice when it is missed. That part is not the Council's job, nor the newsroom's. It is yours.

CPA Enock Nyanchoga Monari is Managing Partner at ECM Consulting Group LLP and a Board Member of the Media Council of Kenya.