James Okong’o is a digital investigative journalist for Agence France-Presse (AFP) in Nairobi, Kenya. The 2025 Harvard University Nieman Fellow’s work focuses on fact-checking information, which he did during elections in Kenya in 2022. He also writes about the flow of disinformation across Africa. During this conversation with Bush Institute Global Policy Director Natalie Gonnella-Platts and Bush Institute Senior Editorial Advisor William McKenzie, Okong’o discusses the media landscape in Africa, the role of China and Russia in the continent’s information landscape, and the trust Kenyans place in the media. A portion of the interview is presented in the accompanying video while the rest is included in the text below. The latter has been edited for length and clarity.
What works for distribution of news, information, and commentary in Kenya? And what’s important for people to remember about how Kenyans and others across the continent get their news?
Basically, people get there news here from social media and WhatsApp groups. I’m in a lot of the latter. I see there how newspapers are really dying because people are sharing PDF versions of a newspaper. That includes even The New York Times. These are people who have money and who could actually subscribe.
How difficult is it for journalists to get accurate information, including from the government? For example, how hard was it for you to get information about the Kenyan and Nigerian elections that you covered?
When you support a particular political party or group, you don’t want to write anything bad about what they do. I find it wrong to propagate information just for them. This is happening a lot in Kenya and Nigeria. I’ve seen a lot of publications just producing stories because they don’t like the opposition party or the government. So, they write a lot of bad things about them, things that most of the time are not even true. If they like the government but it does something bad, they don’t want to publish the piece.
The way Africans do it is wrong, and that’s why we’re struggling. People are learning, educated, and know what is true and false. And we keep on publishing this kind of stuff.
I started subscribing to The New York Times in 2017 and still do. But I don’t subscribe to local news operations here because they don’t give me the kind of information I’m looking for. I know a lot of other people who do the same: Subscribe to The Times, but not local stuff.
When you say people know the difference between right and wrong, fact and non-fact, what do you mean? How do they know that?
People are looking for good, quality information. But if you look at some of the publications here, such as the mainstream media houses, sometimes they publish propaganda. And because it favors a very big segment of the society, you’ll find that people really like it. They go with the wave. They don’t care whether a report is true or false.
But there is another segment of society that is not getting what it wants. That’s why there is a shortcoming, and the African media is collapsing fast.
We have content creators, people who are not even trained journalists. But people are consuming what they put out there more than they are consuming information from media houses.
Could you talk about how you and others who are looking for trustworthy information deal with digital mercenaries who have been paid to organize disinformation campaigns around elections in Kenya and Nigeria? And could you talk about other challenges that undermine the free press in Kenya and beyond?
My investigation into those digital mercenaries was a challenge, but you just keep asking questions and knocking on doors. You’ll always find that politicians are the people who spread disinformation or hire people through confidants to spread political lies and attack opponents. But sometimes you will reach that one person who is hungry to tell the truth and they will give you the information you are looking for. They may tell you about the next person who can give you information as well.
You recently wrote a piece for the Center for News, Technology, and Innovation where you said that 66% of Kenyans have trust in the media, while 36% have trust in the government. What is working in your country in building trust in the media?
We now have small media organizations. I know a number of people who have started small nonprofits that are independent of governments. These organizations are few, but they are doing very good work.
I’ve also seen this in Nigeria and South Africa. A lot of people are getting information from these platforms. I think that’s where the trust comes in. These people use social media to share the information with their viewers. The good thing about the non-profits is they are not behind paywalls, so people access the information for free.
You think it is these types of institutions who people are talking about when they say they trust the media?
It’s these new non-profit digital news platforms and vernacular radio, which are quite popular. Most of the vernacular radios, even the Swahili ones, have more localized content that’s targeted directly to the audience. They share information as it is because they are speaking with their own people. They treat them differently, so that’s makes people trust these platforms quite a lot.
If you travel outside Nairobi to a region where people speak the same language, you’ll find people tuned to small radio stations. Then you’ll find small publications, small newspapers, community newspapers that are published in local languages. People really trust them. Almost everyone has a copy.
How did you get interested in fact-checking, which is your expertise?
Sheer luck. I graduated from college in 2017, and a German organization came into my university and did a one-day workshop on disinformation. At the time, it wasn’t quite big here. I had to do a presentation and make a pitch to a workshop. A guy told me he was trying to set up a fact-checking organization, and that the things I had mentioned would work for them. He said we can do this together, which is how I got my first job looking into disinformation.
Where should people and/or institutions that have the capacity to support independent media put their focus? And that includes people and institutions from outside your country.
I’ll start with my problem with markets like the one in the U.S. I’ve lived there and seen how they measure impact with engagement, with eyeballs. I don’t think any sponsor in Africa should use that criterion. In Africa, our politicians are very clever. They work very closely with people who know how to corrupt social media organizations. You publish a story about them, but they don’t allow it to have enough reach. They thwart it through social media by the time you release it.
I usually tell people that, whatever else we do here, what matters is that we had an opportunity to document what is or was happening. It’s important enough just to put it out there and tell the stories like the ones that I told about digital mercenaries trying to influence elections in Kenya and Nigeria. The story took me more than six months. It was very difficult to do. But some politicians loved the story simply because it gave them publicity. They say publicity is publicity. It doesn’t matter whether the notice is positive or negative.
