Some days at Floriweek feel like a relay race with no baton, only urgency. Today, thursday, April 9, 2026 was one of them. I began at the airport with a refrigeration firm talking cold chains, dashed to Thika for a flower farm profile, and closed the day with a crop protection marketer chasing advertising space. Yet it was an encounter in between that lingered longer than any interview.
Ricky, crop pathologist, product registration specialist, and an old friend I had not seen in eight years, picked up our last conversation as though we had paused it yesterday. That last meeting? A crisis. One of his products had been accused of wiping out fish in Lake Naivasha. “What is wrong with you scribes?” he had thundered back then. “How does an adjuvant suddenly become a fish killer?” The anger had not entirely left him.
We revisited the same fault line: is the media merely flawed, or deliberately skewed? Biased or simply ill equipped? It is a question that continues to stalk our industry.
Let us be honest. Coverage of floriculture, especially on environmental stewardship and labour practices, often reads like a verdict delivered before the hearing. Farms are cast, NGOs quoted, and conclusions drawn with suspicious neatness. One side is rendered in shadows, the other in halo.
If this were incompetence, it would be forgivable. Science reporting is not easy, neither is agricultural nuance. But after years of editing horticultural content and walking Kenya’s farms, I struggle to call it innocent. Too often, facts are selected, arranged, and interpreted to fit a narrative already chosen.
What troubles me more is the growing reliance on “impeccable sources” that rarely withstand scrutiny. Activist research has its place, but when it goes unchallenged, it risks becoming advocacy dressed as journalism. And in the process, a globally competitive, tightly regulated sector is casually put on trial.
Floriculture deserves criticism where due, but also fairness. Not theatre. Not selective outrage.
Have a fair reading.