Reporter, Akhaine, wins best print journalist award
Treporter in Kaduna, Saxone Akhaine, has been awarded best print media journalist for promotion of peace and wider coverage of the Southern Kaduna crisis.
This is even as the media was urged not to aggravate the situation through sensational reportage.
Kaduna State Commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs, Samuel Aruwan, who was guest of honour at the maiden yearly lecture/ media award of the Kabido chapel of the Nigeria Union Of Journalists ( NUJ), presented the award.
He pointed out that the media had worsened the violence in the area through reports, urging credible reflection of the situation.
Also in a lecture tagged “Southern Kaduna Crisis: How has the media fared?”, the guest speaker and former chairman of NUJ, Kaduna Council, Andrew Fadason, observed: “If we scrutinise the stories we have done in the last couple of years, we would notice that we have been economical with our guiding principles of fairness and objectivity.”
He went on: “Close to 90 per cent of the stories published are one- sided. They present one side of the fact( s) and so are not balanced. Press statements and personality interviews are treated as if they were sacrosanct with no need for verification of contentious facts or claims.
“We have narrowed the challenges, conflicts and confrontations to ethnicity and religion forgetting that between and amongst different peoples, it is normal to have contending issues, interests and differences which lead to mutual mistrust, suspicion and or hatred.”
Fadason further said: “We have failed to educate the rest of the world that besides ethnic, jihadist and religious narratives, there are other narratives: Perceived marginalisation, political manipulation and manoeuvring, land grabbing and criminality.”