Blessing Ibunge in Port Harcourt
A non-profitable organisation, Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC) has advised journalists to be gender sensitive when reporting on conflict and humanitarian issues.
The advice was given during a one-day media training on early warning and early response reporting, organised for journalists in Port Harcourt, by CISLAC/Transparency International in Nigeria, with support from Open Society Foundation Africa (OSF-Africa).
Speaking during his presentation titled: “The Role of Media in Building Effective Early Warning and Early Response Mechanisms for Communities in Nigeria: Conflict Sensitive and Objective Reportage”, Dr David Vareba advised the participants to avoid stereotype and bias in their reportage.
He noted that inadequate consideration for gender-sensitivity in conflict reporting process, results in inherent misrepresentation of women’s perceptions and expectations of media reportage.
Vareba observed that proactive training and retraining programmes for journalists on conflict-sensitive reporting, will aide in ensuring compliance to professionalism and objectivity in news coverage and presentation.
He said: “As media plays a crucial role in crisis communication process, objective, verifiable and accurate reportage of early warning signals have become imperative to de-escalate conflict at all levels.
“The advent of social media with the creation of citizen journalism gives rise to factual misrepresentation, unguarded data amplification, unverifiable information publication that escalates potential conflict at all levels.”
At the end of the training, participants agreed that fast-eroding operational independence across media outfits and unattended political interference impact negatively on accurate and factual reporting of conflict signals across the country.
Earlier in his address, Executive Director of CISLAC, Auwal Ibrahim Musa Rafsanjani, said the workshop was aimed at building capacity of the media on accurate and verifiable early warning reporting through enhanced collaboration, communication and coordination that support early response mechanisms.
