Editor,

RE: "Do you trust mainstream media?” (The New Times, December 12).

A rhetoric question in the headline. My short answer? Nope, I don't. But no media anywhere in the world is entirely — each and everyone of them has an agenda which determines what they choose to report or not, how they view and analyse events, and the value they attach or fail to attach to what is happening around the world.

It is the reality that informs such comments as Francois Mitterrand's that a genocide in our country isn't all that important and there is nary a squeak from any media institution in the West, implying, of course, that they can see nothing grotesque or wrong with that point of view.

It is similarly the reason France's Cour de Cassation can reverse lower courts' decisions that suspects of the Genocide against the Tutsi should not be extradited to Rwanda on the grounds that, in the court's view, 'genocide was not a crime in Rwanda at the time of its perpetration in 1994', and not a single Western media outlet finds anything outrageous to say about such an abominable conclusion.

I don't know whether it is because standards have eroded, or whether their vaunted professional journalistic ethics and standards in fact ever existed. I am more inclined to believe that we only believed they ever did because of ignorance, impressionability and naivety.

Mwene Kalinda