It is important for journalists to ensure that public gets right facts
What you need to know:
- There are, however, many claims made by public figures that readers should care to question because they impact on public discourse and policy.
- Africa Check realises that journalists can go wrong in their fact-checking.
An earnest reader called me yesterday to say that Sunday Nation reporters Aggrey Omboki and Geoffrey Rono, who wrote the story “Agony for wives as tea farmers paid bonuses”, published last Sunday, should have fact-checked a claim by a commercial sex worker in Bomet that she expects to make Sh500,000 in 10 days.
While the reader was harping on an important journalistic principle — the need to fact-check information before it is passed on to readers — this particular claim by a non-public figure was only good enough, I suggested, for bar talk, not serious public discourse.
And we agreed to just laugh and joke about it. I leave it to your imagination what the jokes were.
There are, however, many claims made by public figures that readers should care to question because they impact on public discourse and policy.
For example, how many Kenyans are affected by the current drought?
Do they number 1.3 million, as Lynet Igadwah reports in the story, “Team seeks Sh4.7bn for drought victims”, published in the Daily Nation on Wednesday this week?
How many girls miss school every month because they do not have sanitary towels?
One in 10, as some public figures have claimed? What is the number of residents of Vikolani village in Mombasa county ravaged by jiggers?
Is it 6,000, as claimed in the Daily Nation on Tuesday?
Public figures ought to be held to account for the questionable claims they make in public.
QUALITY INFORMATION
The people who can effectively do this are the journalists themselves. This is beginning to happen.
A former NMG journalist, Alphonce Shiundu, is among those shortlisted for the third year of the African Fact-Checking Award, which honours the best investigative fact-checking carried out by African journalists.
The awards are organised by Africa Check, which promotes accuracy in public debate.
By doing so, the organisation hopes to raise the quality of information available to the public.
Mr Shiundu is cited for his story, “No Mr President, numbers tell a different story,” published in The Standard on September 22, 2015.
The story questions the accuracy of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s speech in which he said the public wage bill is at Sh568 billion.
Mr Shiundu writes: “The Economic Survey 2015, the government report with official data, shows the amount to be Sh418.3 billion.
If we work the maths with the Sh1.1 trillion that the government collected in the last financial year, we get the actual wage bill is 38 per cent of revenues.
If the global average is 35 per cent as the President said, then, we can bake a bigger cake...”
FACTS
Africa Check realises that journalists can go wrong in their fact-checking.
It displays its reports on its websites for readers to judge to what extent the fact-checker is respecting the International Fact-Checking Network’s code of principles, which include non-partisanship, transparency, honest corrections, and public scrutiny.
Another former NMG journalist, Lee Mwiti, has fact-checked the claim that Deputy President William Ruto made on September 9, 2016, that cancer and kidney failure kill more people in Kenya today than malaria, tuberculosis, and Aids combined.
Mr Mwiti comes to the conclusion that the claim is most likely incorrect.
“The estimated number of deaths in 2015 due to HIV alone (36,000) exceed the estimated cancer deaths (28,000) plus kidney failure deaths (3,100).
However, as more than half of deaths in Kenya go unregistered, the figures are highly unreliable. It is, therefore, impossible to say for a fact whether Ruto’s claim is correct or incorrect…” he said.
Both Mr Mwiti and Mr Shiundu were part of the first NMG Media Lab in which I had the honour to conduct a course on feature writing.
It was clear to me even then that these young, talented university graduates were going to go far in their chosen profession.
Mr Mwiti is now the deputy editor at Africa Check, which is based at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
He is playing an important role, holding public figures in Africa to account for what they say. This is good for democracy.
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