The Programmes Officer of the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), Kwaku Krobea Asante has urged traditional journalists to prioritize fact-checking in their line of duty to help check misinformation and disinformation in the media landscape.
He said because the process of creating and sharing information is currently not the preserve of only the trained journalist, people who have access to social media platforms can also create personal content, add their biases to it and disseminate it as factual information when it is not.
This, Mr. Krobea Asante believes is not helpful considering the fact that spreading such information can affect people’s trust in the media landscape.
He, therefore, notes that in order to sanitize the media landscape of such information, certified journalists must always be ready to fact-check them so they can churn out the right information for the public.
“The journalist has the responsibility because the journalist is the certified professional, for the want of a better word, who deals with information, who has the responsibility to provide information to the audience and serve the public interest in that regard. So, you have the responsibility to work with this information and establish which one is the truth because when false information or missing disinformation is allowed to fester the impact, the reputation, and the damage it causes comes back to the news media, really.”
He spoke to the media at a training workshop on Fact-Checking and Countering Mis-Disinformation in Ghana held in Accra.
The workshop was organized by the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) for selected journalists from the Greater Accra, Central, and Western Regions of Ghana.
According to Mr. Krobea Asante, the training is to ensure that journalists become conscious and be able to spot false information and establish the truth.
He added that this will also ensure the improvement in Ghana’s democracy, peace, stability, and even information integrity at a whole.
Journalists from the remaining thirteen regions of Ghana also benefited from the training held with funding support from the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO).
The training was to enhance the knowledge of a total of 125 journalists with at least 40% female on the phenomenon of mis/disinformation and improve their skills for analyzing content and producing fact-check reports.
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Source: Rosemond Asmah/ATLFMNEWS
