Dr. Aurelia Ayesi, a lecturer at the Department of Communication Studies, University of Ghana, has urged Journalists and media institutions to help strengthen the existing democracy in the country.
According to her, the credibility of some journalists and media institutions had become questionable because of the political lens from which they reported.
Dr. Ayesi revealed this to journalists at Takoradi when Dubawa Ghana, a fact-checking institution, in partnership with the United State Embassy of Ghana organized a two-day fact-checking workshop for selected journalists based in non-urban communities in the Western and Western North Regions.
The workshop aimed to train media practitioners to understand the different forms of information and how to fact-check their credibility and authenticity as well as to conduct research and build technological tools that would help identify, analyze, and counter information disorder.
She said fact-checking had become paramount because of the speed at which nonfactual i
nformation traveled, so it was imperative that journalists had the skills to verify whatever they put out there to ensure its correct information.
Before one could correct any false information, it may have gone viral. So, it’s concerted efforts at training journalists to be able to harness those critical skills to better do what you are already doing’.
Dr Ayesi earlier took the participants through the ethics of fact checking and the International Fact Checkers Network (IFCN) Code.
‘Ethics is one of the important pillars that guides fact-checking because fact checking in itself is judgmental journalism. In fact, checking you do not just put out a story with immediacy, it takes time. As a fact-checker, your information should be correct, cross check and ensure its accuracy before you share it with the public’.
‘The IFCN codes talk about credibility of your sources, importance of having multiple sources and being transparent about who your funders are. Resources are one of the key things that determines th
e direction from which you write from’ she added.
Touching on some challenges that journalists encounter, Dr. Ayesi noted that the obvious one was resource constraint and stressed that ‘while journalists themselves have good values and ethics from which they want to report, and rightly so they are also constrained by the kind of media institutions that they work with’.
She stated that ‘a journalist could write a very good fact-checking story but if it does not sit well with his editor or media organization then that story would not be published, so again beyond the resource constraint there is that media ownership angle as well which is also a clear and evident one’.
Source: Ghana News Agency