By Mohamed Daramy
What I have learnt about media reporting is that it is a profession for curious and creative minds. Everything around you is a story in its raw and indigestible form. Curiosity gets you to find out things and creativity plays out in how you choose to inform and educate your audience through storytelling. The crown of it all is holding power to account. If this is something you love doing, then journalism needs you. In all these, being accurate in your media reporting is very important for journalists. A news journalist’s job is to uncover facts that can be verified and attributed to trusted sources. They should not deal in rumor or speculation. Nor should they add their own opinions or feelings when they are compiling their news reports. Accuracy is an essential part of that process.
Accuracy on one hand comes ahead of rush. If you are not sure, then don’t publish until you are. Being first and wrong is not a model a journalist or a reporter should aim for. Being right and always reliable is. It’s better to delay publishing an accurate story than publishing half-baked stories. In reporting, nothing must be included until it has been verified. Verifying a story needs careful consideration before making a final decision on whether to publish it or not. If you are forced to include material that you have been unable to check yourself you must qualify that information by attributing it to a source. In such cases you would use words such as “according to” or “in the words of” so that those consuming your news are not left believing that you are saying it is true. Having a sophisticated readership means that a journalist or reporter should not compromise their work by publishing inaccurate stories. It is also worth adding that you have not been able to verify the information given, if that is the case.
Additionally, in media reporting, accurate note-taking is essential. The usual rule is that notes must not only be accurate, they must also be contemporaneous. That means that you need to have spoken to reliable sources at the time an incident happened rather than jot down information from memory at a later date. Accurate reporting is vital because it ensures that your readers, listeners or viewers have access to reliable information. However, offering accurate reporting on another token is easier said than done because it raises questions of how journalist is actually capable of depicting reality, accurately and truthfully. Inaccurate reporting can lead to incorrect decisions and can damage a company’s reputation. Nonetheless, being accurate as a reporter plays an important role in terms of a fact-based journalistic discourse, since it urges reporters and editors to check whether the presented facts are true or not. Timing and accuracy is really what matters in media reporting at the end of the day.
