Linda Asante Agyei, vice president of the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA), has urged media outlets to refrain from announcing the results of the 2024 election.
She asserts that the Electoral Commission (EC) alone is in charge of that.
She spoke at the opening of an SDG facility project, which aims to improve climate reporting and safeguard media freedom, that the Ghana Center for Democratic Development and the Danish Embassy were collaborating on.
Linda Asante Agyei emphasized the importance of reporting responsibly, pointing out that false information may cause disputes.
She stated:
“Our role becomes very, very, very, very key to ensure that we report and report responsibly, we come out with the right information, and we are doing this in collaboration with the Electoral Commission. You know, they also take us through some training to ensure that we report and report adequately.”
“Remember, for us as media houses, we are not the final institutions to even announce election results, it’s supposed to be the EC, and we have to do that in collaboration with them. So once EC declares before we can also declare, we need to know the extension between providing or presenting the provisional results and then the final results. Ours is just to present the provisional results until EC certifies the results before we can, you know, also announce.”
Rev. Mawuli Tsikata, a member of the Citi FM project implementation team, spoke about steps being taken as part of the SDG project to guarantee factual reporting. These steps include training journalists to battle disinformation and using AI techniques to identify fake news.
“So, our project is mainly a digital project. It’s to help with digital reporting. What we’ve seen is that there are a lot of challenges with journalism these days when it comes to reporting news on online platforms, that has to do with fake news, disinformation, misinformation.”
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