15th February, 2024
By Taiwo Okanlawon
The International Press Centre (IPC) has held a training session for journalists in Nigeria on combating fake news, democratic governance reporting and holding politicians in Nigeria accountable to their electoral promises.
The training which has 41 journalists from different media houses selected across the south-west states took place in Akure, Ondo State capital. Participants were taught how to use fact-check tools such as Google reverse image, TinEye, meta data, flight aware, among others.
The training was organised by IPC in collaboration with EU-Support to Democratic Governance in Nigeria (EU-SDGNll).
According to the Executive Director of IPC, Mr Lanre Arogundade, the two-day capacity building is important to equipped journalists on combating Information Disorder in Democratic Governance Reporting, Using Fact-Check and FOI Tools
Arogundade said that the challenges of disinformation and misinformation by whatever form made fact-check imperative.
He said that social media enabled people to generate misinformation easily, spread it rapidly, do so anonymously and decentralised it.
Arogundade explained that misinformation as sharing of false information without knowing it amounted to false or despite suspicion, it could be false-rumours, insults or pranks.
He said disinformation was concoction of untrue news and the sharing of such news with the knowledge that they were false.
“Malinformation arises when an information that it is true is spread in a malicious manner with the objective of causing harm,” he said.
He said, “the danger of disinformation is that it could lead to spread of falsehood, leading to disbelief or not knowing what to believe, panic and anxiety, especially in moments of crisis, among others.
“Fact-check is verifying information in public domain by public officials, organisations, media and social media, fact-check is not a ricket science,” he said.
He said fact-check was a scrupulous analysis driven by one basic question – “how do we know that?” noting that fact-check is not a spell-check”
On the steps for fact-check, the IPC CEO, urged journalists to eliminate biases, diversifying and using multiple credible sources, distinguish between facts and opinion or between facts and fiction and also apply journalistic curiosity or common sense.
Arogundade, however, urged journalists to always ensure that they used the knowledge gained from the workshop to combat misinformation, disinformation and malinformation in the society.
Also speaking during the training, the Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief of The Guardian, Martins Oloja, who was one of the facilitators at the training, encouraged journalists not to relent in reporting key issues and holding politicians accountable to the promise to the people.
Oloja said, “These are issues in democracy and these are the issues that affect our development. We in the media need to note that it is our responsibility to monitor governance and it is our responsibility to hold these people to account for some of those performance indicators as matters arising from the budgets.
“As journalists, we should not relent and also increase the temperament and the tempo of asking them to account for what we do before the election. Before anything. We need to question certain data and advocate for reforms.
“We should continue to do investigation using so many tools like the budget tools. What are those campaign promises and are those campaign promises captured in the budget of these states?”
He also urged Nigerians to constantly hold their representatives accountable at all times.