By Haruna Salami
The United States Embassy in Nigeria, Mythos Labs and Positive Peace have organized training on Countering Misinformation for journalists in Abuja.
Andran Siddiqi, Counselor for Public Affairs, U.S. Embassy, Abuja who declared the training open said the focus was on misinformation and disinformation and how to counter them.
The event, which came under public-private partnership had about 30 journalists who will go on to train other journalists around the country about misinformation and disinformation.
The training is to equip journalists on “how to do fact checking, how to make sure that the news that is distributed to the Nigerian public is as accurate and as real as possible so that we eliminate a lot of misinformation and disinformation in the country.
The training looked at identifying, investigating and reporting misinformation and how to counter them.
Speaking on the recent elections in the country, Adnan Siddiqi thinks “all elections are very similar in the sense that you have political parties and political interests that are always trying to seek advantage in the media. We see this in the United States, we see this in Nigeria, we see this all around the world.
“The challenge is for the media on how they separate what is a political message from what is the real fact on the ground. It is something that every journalist and every media house struggles with, especially in election campaigns and in reporting election results.
The Counselor for Public Affairs said the U.S Embassy organized a lot of similar trainings before the last election.
“Last year, we have, in partnership with the Nigerian Guild of Editors did workshops in five different cities around the country to talk on how do we empower journalists and how they can learn the trade and the craft well enough to actually report well on the elections.
“Nigerian journalists have gone through many elections; this is not the first and they are very capable of doing their best in terms of covering the elections.
Siddiqi said it is very important to the United States in general to have freedom of the press around the world. “We see this as intrinsic to democracy and we still believe that democracy is the best way to organize government to give advantage to the people so that their voices are heard and they are represented fully in government.
“Freedom of the press is something that we encourage all over the world through our NGOs, through our private sector partnerships. We think it is a way for free flow of information, to get accurate information out there. Like I said, it is a competition of ideas. Some people are very aggressive in the way they promote their ideas. Some people in some outlets are willing to mislead the public to gain advantage. This is what we are trying to prevent through this workshop.
According to the programme of the training, Katsina will have its turn on March 30, Borno will be on April 8, Zamfara April 10, Yobe April 12 and Adamawa April 13.
