Mrs Linda Asante Agyei, Vice President of the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA), has urged journalists to take all necessary precautions to ensure their safety during the 2024 presidential and parliamentary elections.
She said journalists played a crucial role in ensuring accurate, unbiased information reached the public, which was essential for maintaining a transparent and credible election process.
“The safety of journalists is very critical this year and we should make sure that we live to tell the story and not as being the story to be told,” she said.
The GJA Vice President gave the advice in an interview with the media on the sideline of a three-day pre-election workshop organised for 30 journalists at Aburi in the Eastern Region, over the weekend.
Organised by Reporters Without Borders (RSP), the workshop sought to equip journalists with information and guidelines of election coverage to enable them to effectively deliver on their mandates.
Participants were taking through critical election topics such as guidelines for election coverage, gatekeeping role of journalists in elections, elections and safety of journalists, fact-checking, and the risk in election reporting, among others.
Mrs Asante Agyei noted that this year’s election was a crucial one, stressing the need for accurate reportage.
She said the safety of journalists was essential in achieving a credible poll before, during and after the elections and urged them not to sacrifice their lives in their efforts to obtain information during the elections.
Mrs Asante Agyei said the safety of journalists was a major priority for the GJA, particularly in the run-up to the December 7 polls and entreated media practitioners to hold high ethical and professional standards to ensure that their safety and that of others were protected.
Mr Umaru Sanda Amadu, Broadcast Journalist with Citi FM and Channel 1 Television, said as frontliners in the election, journalists had a crucial role to play to safeguard the electoral process and protect the peace and democracy of the country.
Journalists, he said, must therefore be careful and report accurately, adding that the media must “hasten cautiously” in trying to be the first to break results of the election.
Mr Alfred Ocansey, Head of Political Desk at Media General, stressed the need for journalists to thoroughly scrutinise information received to establish their authenticity before publishing, cautioning them against “sacrificing accuracy for speed.”
He said: “At no point should journalists be in a hurry to put out information that has not been verified.”
Ms Zubaida Mabuno Ismail, Country Representative for Reporters Without Borders, advised journalists to immediately leave the scene if their lives were threatened saying, “no story is worth or lives.”
She also urged media organisations to be courageous in their quest to project the elections, describing it as an effective mechanism for checking the Electoral Commission, electoral process, and the political parties.
“When you look at other jurisdictions, they call the elections. In Ghana here, we don’t call elections, we project elections and if our system, our regulations allow us to project election, what’s wrong with that.
“So, we shouldn’t be cowards into not doing it, it’s our job because we all put the Electoral Commission in check and then all other stakeholders in check because who knows whatever they are scheming behind.
“But when you are able to project then it sends them a signal that people are watching and as you are analysing in your strong room at your party headquarters, journalists are also analysing in their strong rooms in their news companies, and so that is something we should be proud of and we should keep doing it,” she explained.
Mr Kofi Adu Domfeh, News Editor, Multimedia, advised journalists to “treat every polling station as a potential hotspot” to avoid being taken by surprise.
Other speakers at the training workshop were Mr Bright Nana Amful, Broadcaster with Metro TV and Mr Evans Aziamor-Mensah of Fact-Check Ghana and the Fourth Estate.
GNA