Newsmax journalist Rob Finnerty has said sorry to Kenyans after a comment he made about New York City drew anger from across the country. In a statement released on Tuesday, October 13, he admitted he got it wrong and said he regretted the words that had upset so many people on social media.
The trouble started with a Newsmax segment where Finnerty talked about immigration, street life and delivery riders in New York City. He argued that the number of migrants from poorer countries coming into the United States under former President Joe Biden had changed the feel of some American cities. To make his point, he said that cities which welcome migrants were beginning to look more like Nairobi than New York.
That comparison did not sit well with Kenyans. Many took to X, Facebook and Instagram to ask why Nairobi was being used as the example of a city in trouble. Others went straight to Newsmax and Finnerty's own pages, flooding them with messages demanding an apology. Some people pointed out that none of the folks interviewed in the clip said they were from Kenya or Nairobi. To them, it looked like the city was being thrown in just to make a bad picture.
In his apology, Finnerty said he was sorry to the people of Nairobi and Kenya as a whole. He said he could see how much Kenyans love their city and their country, and admitted he had misspoken. He also complained that the media was not doing a good job of showing the changes he was talking about, and he compared what was happening in New York with what he said was going on in the United Kingdom and France.
The people shown in the segment said they came from Guatemala, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Mexico and Guinea. That is the detail that made many Kenyans ask hard questions. For them, the bigger problem is not one bad comment on TV. It is the old habit of foreign media picking African cities as the symbol of chaos, dirt and danger, without bothering to get the full story.
Finnerty's apology is a step in the right direction, but it has not calmed everyone down. Many Kenyans say they want foreign broadcasters to be more careful about how they talk about the continent, and they are watching to see whether this will change how such stories are told in future. For now, the apology has been accepted by some and questioned by others, and the debate about how Africa is portrayed in international media is still very much alive.
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