The IPC said the training equipped participants with the knowledge and skills needed to play their vital role in upholding democratic values and ensuring politicians are held accountable for their electoral promises made to the people.
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 IPC said the training equipped participants with the knowledge and skills needed to play their vital role in upholding democratic values and ensuring politicians are held accountable for their electoral promises made to the people.
It described it as part of its crucial step towards strengthening Nigeria's democracy.
The Centre said that the overall objective of the training was to strengthen the media for fair, accurate, ethical and inclusive reporting of the electoral processes and elections and particularly seeks to combat information disorder/fake news in democratic governance reporting using fact-checking and Freedom of Information (FOI) tools.
Speaking on the objectives of the training, the Executive Director of IPC, Lanre Arogundade, emphasized that journalists play a critical role in ensuring the credibility of elections and strengthening democratic processes.
Arogundade said, “The major objectives of the training first is to ensure that we report elections and electoral processes factually, and accurately and ensure that we fact-check the necessary information.
“The second objective of the training is that after elections we need to hold our leaders accountable and therefore, we have to look at those campaign promises, assess their state of implementation, not just from the view of the government but from the view of the people and what we ourselves are able to verify because we believe that by doing that we can help our people to solve some of their problems.
“The whole idea is that if somebody says he will do this, our duty is to remind them and to ensure that that is done.”
The IPC boss urged Nigerian journalists to be wary of fake news and ensure they are abreast of tools that can be used to fact-check and spot disinformation being peddled by politicians and their political allies.
He further called on the Nigerian government as well as media owners to ensure they create an enabling environment for journalists to practice without fear or attack.
He said, “The third objective is to make us better journalists. These days, we are dealing with a whole lot of what we call information disorder. There is disinformation, there is misinformation and sometimes you are at a loss but fortunately, there are tools, there are methodologies, there are techniques that we can use to verify information and ensure that by the time we file our reports, nobody will be able to pick faults in those reports.
“We believe that if journalists are better, if journalism is better, society will be better. But we are not unmindful of the fact that we need an enabling environment for us to practice good journalism.
“So when we have training like this, we also use the opportunity to call on the professional bodies in the media, the Nigerian Union of Journalists, the Nigerian Guild of Editors and the newspapers' proprietors to do more to protect journalists who come under attack on the basis of the stories that they are doing.
“We also use this opportunity to call on the government to understand that the media can help make society better. They need to provide the information proactively, particularly during this period of insecurity.”
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.