By Abdulai Fasineh Dumbuya
As part of efforts to meet the standard reporting threshold, a media trainer and journalist, Martha Kargbo urged her colleague journalists to integrate Participation, Accountability, Non-Partisan or Non-Partial, Empowerment and Legal references (PANEL) in their daily work.
She made this call at a day media training for journalists on the topic “Countering Gendered Disinformation’’ on 16th October 2023, with the view to revamping routine news reporting.
As time wore on, she said so did news reportage changes to meet best practices of journalism around the world and that journalists, in particular, need to familiarize themselves with the day-to-day techniques to meet standard reporting guidelines.
Underscoring the relevance of PANEL in news reporting, she said every news story should involve the participation of people, that is, if a journalist is doing a story on gender, both men and women have to be seen and felt in the story.
“The essence of journalism is to impact the lives of the ordinary people. So, journalists should try to get a plethora of voices in their stories. We hold people accountable when things get wrong; similarly, people will hold us to account if we do not tell the story as it happens’’ she said.
She added that it is always a good practice for journalists to declare that they have a conflict of interest in a story before they can allow their feelings to override their ethical norms and principles.
The Media Trainer noted that every story has to create a change and described the act as empowerment. She added that consistent follow-up on stories without letup can give a full realization of empowerment.
“Whenever you are doing a story, and by the way of standard reporting you have to bring a reference from a legal or established documents’’ the Media Trainer emphasized.
Asked whether only community stories are human interest stories, she said human-based stories are not limited to community stories but said that every story is a human interest story because it all has a human element in it. Depending on the angle you are writing from, she said determines whether your story is worth considering as a human interest story or not.
Speaking on the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) reports, she said that the level of participation and influence of women in the media also has implications for media content, noting that it is impossible for men to effectively cover gender-related issues.
In terms of women’s needs and perspectives in the media, she said female media professionals are more likely to reflect other women’s needs and perspectives than their male colleagues, hence, encouraged women to increase their presence in working in the media to cover women’s needs and perspectives.
She therefore encouraged journalists to promote gender-sensitive stories to increase the reflection, discussion and awareness-raising among actors, the private sector, the civil society, and the government.
Copyright © 2023 Politico (23/10/23)
