By Muhammad Aminu and Uzair Adam Imam
A Senior Lecturer at the Department of Mass Communication, Bayero University, Kano, Dr Ibrahim Siraj Adhama, has urged journalists to fact-check figures to change the narratives by the media that paint Northern Nigeria black.
Adhama stated this at a One-Day Workshop for Early-Career Journalists on Reporting Northern Nigeria, Fake News and Journalism Ethics organized by a Kano-based online media organization, The Daily Reality.
The workshop, which was held at Bayero University, Kano, was organized by the management team of The Daily Reality Newspaper to groom journalists in Northern Nigeria on reporting.
He said our northern reporters should have apparatuses to re-examine statistics by the World Bank and IMF, among others, before reporting them for public consumption.
Adhama, who spoke on “Issues in Reporting Northern Nigeria: A Framing/Agenda Setting Perspective, said the north was represented in media as economically and educationally backward with a high number of out-of-school children.
He said, “We need to stop swallowing statistics about us. Most of these statistics by the World Bank, IMF, etc., will never favour us.
“Thus, we should have an apparatus to re-examine them before reporting them,” he added.
Speaking on how those reports affect Hausa-Muslim northerners and, by extension, other ethnic groups, Adhama maintained that all the things we read about us in the Southern media were in themselves, despite claiming objectivity, subjective.