The Nigeria Employers’ Consultative Association (NECA) in collaboration with the Centre for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) has trained journalists on the mitigation of inappropriate information and its negative impact on private businesses in Nigeria.

At the training session, which had the theme ‘Combating Disinformation in a Digital Age: Fact-Checking for Responsible Journalism’, experts described journalists as key actors in the fight against fake news and disinformation and urged them to arm themselves with knowledge, skills and a questioning mind.

Executive Director, the International Press Centre, Lanre Arogundade, said it had become necessary for journalists to fact-check, saying journalism comes with the discipline of verification.

He advised journalists to use fact-checking facilities while producing reports, stressing that this would ensure the credibility of their work and set them apart from disinformation purveyors.

Arogundade said: “Social media allows individuals to generate their content, put it out there, and then when it comes to public interest issues, sometimes they mislead the public. They provide information about politicians who are leading us, and our main duty is to help sanitize the information space.

“So, what we have done is to say that, what fact-checking does is to remind us of those basic obligations of asking necessary questions and where we are not sure, use relevant tools to get the correct information and push it out there,” he said.

Arogundade stressed that journalists had the responsibility of letting people know that sharing what they did not know the source, could also be very harmful to the public in the sense that some of this disinformation could lead to hate speech.

Executive Director of the Media Career Development Network, Lekan Otufodunrin, noted that the training was to empower journalists on the need for fact-checking and apply it to their day-to-day work.

Otufodunrin noted that the workshop was timely, stressing that it came at a time when there was no regulation and so much fake news that could mislead, deceive and make people make wrong decisions.

He argued that it is important that journalists show evidence, as they are the real professionals and be in that space where people are not deceived.

Director-General of NECA, Adewale-Smatt Oyerinde, said the research was carried out to explore challenges of information to private businesses and provide policy options, part of which was a call to improve the capacity of journalists working directly on issues around businesses.