Citizen TV Accused Of Underhand Practices, Unfair Dominance In Kenyan Media Landscape

Citizen TV has been put under the spotlight after a popular Kenyan tweep shared a revealing thread detailing the media station’s alleged underhand practices and unfair business competition.

The thread, which seeks to unearth the station’s national lead over the last several years, poked holes into the recurrent consistency which has seen the Royal Media Services station maintain an unassailable lead over all other stations for over half a decade.

Various issues raised, which the author of the thread said are the malaise affecting the station, are the fact that the station has “demonstrated no ingenuity, creative inventiveness and a willingness to scale higher” as far as their innovativeness is concerned.Below is the entire thread as compressed by us.

The Kenyan traditional media landscape has, for close to a decade now, exhibited signs of lethargy, sluggishness and stagnation as the digital world zooms past the TV world, relegating the television terrain to the back burners.Kenya is one of the most vibrant and dynamic countries in Africa as far as media is concerned, existing in the same competitive pool as Nigeria, South Africa and Ghana.

As Africa continues to develop as a continent and many of its individual countries push towards higher levels of growth and technological advancement, Kenya steadfastly remains at the helm of the competition, littered with various high-powered TV stations and with an aggressive news and entertainment programming.

But despite the position Kenya proclaims in the African media landscape, the TV stations in the country continue to manifest a certain stuntedness which appears to have been occasionied by unfair media practices coupled with an inequitable dominance.Quite curiously, Citizen TV, which has been, over the years, touted as the Number One TV station in Kenya, has been leading in all media polls for at least the last five years – this is despite the fact that the station has demonstrated no ingenuity, creative inventiveness and a willingness to scale higher as far as their innovativeness is concerned.

Since 2020, for instance, and obviously years before that, Citizen TV has emerged tops whenever various survey bodies have released their results of the leading Kenyan TV station and with a percentage, which, sometimes, appears to remain unchanged and questionably so.

As a result of the unchallenged dominance and constricting chokehold the TV station has on the Kenyan media terrain, the Kenyan TV world’s window of creativity, fair competitiveness and even business ascendancy has become greatly compromised.

A quick glance at the Citizen TV leverage over all the other media stations will reveal an implausible trend – a Geopoll survey in 2022, showed that Citizen TV had a whooping 24 percent share while NTV came in second with a meager 9.5 percent.

A CAK 2020 Report, released in December 2019, showed that Citizen TV scored an impressive 48% while the closest challenger KTN Home only managed a paltry 11.9%. An IPSOS Survey released in 2024, showed that Citizen TV was the most watched station across the country with 39.68 per cent market share out of the total 48.13 per cent.

Doing the math, one easily realizes that the station is claimed to control 13,133,100 views of the total Kenyan market of 33,097,640 viewers – this is in a country with several other leading TV stations some of which have demonstrated impressive growth and risen exponentially to grab the market share.In 2023, for instance, the same Ipsos Survey revealed that Citizen TV was the most watched station at 68.4%, with KTN second at 25.3% and NTV third at 11%.Just a year later, a Media Council of Kenya survey would place Citizen TV as the most-watched TV station in Kenya with 35% followed by NTV with a staggeringly low 11%.

The incredible disparity in the numbers, the dubiety of the difference margins, the mismatch in the different survey bodies and the sometimes ridiculously high placing of the Citizen TV market share is not only suspicious but also gravely indecorous.It’s farcical to think that Citizen TV, in its current composition, can, for instance, lurp up as much as a 68% national viewership given its myriad of challenges in talent management, content production and digital enterprise.

Lately, the station has actually witnessed an almost unprecedented talent hemorrhage as most of its star reporters and news anchors have left to join more lucrative offices – Waihiga Mwaura left for the BBC, Victoria Rubadiri left for the CNN, Francis Gachuri and Chemutai Goin also left for various offices in Government.None of these talents, not surprisingly, have been replaced. Insider information tells us that there are actually no plans to replace these heavyweights and, even more shockingly, more big names are planning to leave too.

Citizen TV is currently a Kenyan media relic which has, even after the introduction of its digital wing, still found it hard to scale the ever-changing digital ecosystem which is stifled with pernicious competition from tens of YouTube reporters.

A media outlet bogged by all these challenges, which also include an inability to navigate modern reporting and a pool of obsolescent senior editors, who have failed to move with the times and embrace a new-age TV space, cannot continuously claim to hold the spots it does – and command the market share it boasts – without shady, underhand practises.

The possibility of Citizen TV paying for these polls, to influence the outcome and wrest control of the market, advertising millions and bragging rights, is not just real but also substantially contestable.

The Kenyan TV industry, therefore, has suffered an incalculable loss of advertising revenue and also competitive edginess owing to Citizen TV’s unsportsmanlike conduct, only buoyed by the Chairman’s deep pockets and guileful tendencies by the polling authorities.In fact, the most fundamental risk in Citizen TV’s media dominance is the dismissive arrogance that comes with the notion of being Number One – armed with that reality, the station essentially devalues talent and sees no need to better remunerate it’s employees who, it believes, it can easily dispense and still maintain its top position.

An employee seeking a salary raise, for instance, can be quickly shut down or even be asked to quit if they wish as Citizen TV does not value individual talent as it views it’s dominance as the sole bargaining chip and anyone who needs to be better paid as just a simple, expendable block in the matrix.In such an environment, TV shows developed and broadcast by the station, too, can be of the most inferior quality and they will still sell, anyways.

The station’s uncontested lead essentially means that one willing to sell prime material to the station can walk away with a bag of potatoes as the station believes that heavy investment, or not, does not diminish its lead and cannot dent its impregnable reputation.

This is a harsh indictment on the station’s contribution to the artistic and financial growth of the creative sector. On a fair playground, every one of the Kenyan TV stations, NTV, KTN, TV 47, K24, KBC and more included, can approach the business ethically and every player can reap their benefits as per their evolving contributions to the industry as far as news dissemination, show programming and digital sophistication is concerned.

As things stand, the industry can chose to collapse under the weight of doctored dominance – or demand for accountability and watch it rise like the proverbial phoenix.