By Eberechi Obinagwam
With the high rate of disinformation and misinformation that is rapidly gaining ground in society, Nigeria Employers’ Consultative Association, (NECA) in collaboration with the Centre for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) brought journalists in the labour beat to train them on Fact Checking, a skill necessary for responsible journalism.
The one day training was held on Friday, December 1, at NECA’S head office in Lagos with the theme; Combating Disinformation in a Digital Age – Fact-Checking for Responsible Journalism.
At the training, Lekan Otufodunrin, Executive Director of Media Career Development Network, while teaching on disinformation, impact and consequences said with the high rate of disinformation spreading around, seeing does not make any information shared true.
He said the saying that anyone who shares information is a journalist is not true.
“That Technology has made it possible for everyone to share information does not mean that everyone who shares information is a journalist. A journalist let the public know about any issues, verify information and when in doubt, leave out,” he said.
He noted that writing stories these days should not be about who publishes first, but about the person that gets it right.
“We should understand that we are competing with those who have phones and can share information, not with our fellow journalists. We should maintain our reputation by using fact checking skills for better and responsible journalism,” he said.
Also, Lanre Arogundade, Executive Director of the International Press Centre (IPC), a speaker at the training, said journalists can check fake news if we become dictative of disinformation by arming ourselves with knowledge, skills and questioning mind to look at information and decide whether we should not do some verification before we go out with that information.
He said; ”Journalism comes with the discipline of verification. So when we talk about fact checking, essentially it is about verification. That beat becomes important especially now that we are no longer controlling the media space. Social media allows individuals to generate their own contents and put them out there. And most times, when it gets to public interest issues, sometimes they mislead the public. They provide information about politicians, personalities that are not true. But, our main interest is to sensitise disinformation in the space.
“What we have done is to remind us of those basic obligations, asking necessary questions and where we are not sure, we use relevant tools to get the correct information and push it out there,” he noted.
He explained that journalists have the responsibility of letting people know that sharing words that we do not know the source of can actually be harmful to the public knowing that some of these words can lead to hate speech.
“Our role as journalists is to advocate for a sensitise information space so that citizens can rely on us for credible information,” he said.
Arogundade, urged journalists to make sure that their information is based on facts not what they think.
“Facts go with evidence. We must have journalistic curiosity or common sense to be able to fact check statements, pictures, videos, reports, etc. If we write above our bias. It will make us balance our stories,” he said.