GNI

Responsibilities of journalists during election time

By Qaqamba Matundu

Media organisations and journalists plays a vital role in the electoral process by assuring the dissemination of news and diverse opinions. Media makes possible deeper knowledge of candidates, parties and their programs. Journalists contribute to the effective participation of citizens in democratic debate, especially by ensuring that issue of public interest remain at the centre of election campaign. 

Reports as “Journalists must resist the pressure of their own opinion which they should express in the privacy of voting station, like any other citizen. They are expected to treat all politicians impartially regardless of the sympathies or antipathies they may feel towards them.

A professional work of journalism must be accurate, verified, balanced, neutral and respectful of human dignity. Journalists must have rights to provide information without being pressured or threatened, bring with it the duty to provide voters with objective, instructive and construction information.” (Journalists handbook,2015)

According to a handbook of journalist during election (2015), a journalist must search for truth and recount it as completely as possible while exercising a critical sense that demands systematic confirmation of all facts in the article and for information to be considered reliable journalists must ensure that, what they are reporting is true since around election time it is common for rumours to be spread. 

It is journalist’s responsibility to make sure there is no error in the article. When a journalist realises or is informed that he/she has used inaccurate information he/she must correct it rapidly and with the same prominence given to the original article. Sources must be cited because an article with anonymous sources is considered suspect and unreliable.

A journalist must report on party programmes and debates between the parties or candidates so that citizens may compare them. But professional reporting must never tell citizens who the best choice would be. A journalist should leave that job to editorial writers and commentators. 

A journalist must devote equal and balanced attention to all parties and candidates. Journalistic information can help awaken political consciousness and a high level of voter participation. For example, explaining in detail the procedures that guarantee the secrecy of the ballot thereby preventing retaliation can calm fears that some voters have.

Journalists gather information and present the information in an accurate, honest and fair way to general public in order that the public might just never be able to know what is going on in the world around them. Journalists also have a responsibility to serve the public interest, they must do so by following the laws of the land. A journalist must know the laws of libel and slander so that he or she does not go against them. 

There are freely available tools to help journalists to find, visualise, protect their stories around election time. Reports as, “The course of fundamental teaches skills every journalist needs for reporting in the digital age. Journalist for publications all over the world uses Google Search everyday but many are not getting the most out of it. If journalists take advantage of helpful features built right within search, they can better results fast instead of typing paragraph-long search queries that generate irrelevant results. They need to check out advanced search tool by setting options at google.com

Covering politics with Google Trends is a module that looks at ways to use Google Trends to analyse searches specifically related to politics. As journalists report on election campaigns, they can turn to the Google Trend tool to see which topics people are searching for the most.

Visualising elections can help audience to quickly digest polls not forgetting the use of Google 

Data GIF Maker that helps journalists to make visuals that shows the share of interest for competing topics. Journalists can help their election visualisation live by linking them to Google Sheets and Flourish.

Journalists need to protect their work during election time but how? News organisations get under attack during this time that is why Google and its sister company Jigsaw have some tools to help and protect them. They need to secure their network with Outline VPN. Outline makes it easy for news organisations to set up a corporate VPN on their own server to more safely connect to the internet and keep their communication private. 

Lastly a free tool to protect your site from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is project Shield that uses technology to protect news publishers from a threat of the attack of being taken offline. Project Shield is a reverse proxy that uses Google’s own defences and network capacity to protect news sites. This provides a shield against the attackers by filtering out malicious traffic. It also catches some sites elements to lighten the load on your own serverswhich can improve site performance and reduce your bandwidth cost. 

Millions of articles are published online everyday and not all of them are true. Fact check tool can help journalists to distinguish facts from fiction. This tool helps journalists find articles that debunk false or misleading claims. Another tool is Googles Fact Check Explorer that is designed to facilitate the work of fact checkers, journalists and research in discovering what hasn’t been debunked all over the globe.” (Google News Initiative)

Ifes (2018) perceives report as “Journalists have an important role to play in facilitating political discourse, fostering transparency and information sharing and serving as an effective forum for public debate, all of which strengthens the democratic process. In order to fulfil these responsibilities, journalists must be equipped with the knowledge and skills needed to conduct accurate election reporting and they must also be made aware of their duty to mitigate hate speech and incitement to violence that too often arise in election environment.”

Reports as “Ethical responsibility is also another very important responsibility of a journalist. The journalism profession is governed by code of ethics which help bringing the best out of journalists. An ethical journalist knows that he or she has the responsibility to be honest, accurate and fair in disclosing all facts regarding an event. The ethical journalist also knows that his or her personal belief have no place in the story being reported. An ethical journalist knows that there are certain times when he can’t just send every piece of information that he gets into the public domain.” (Hosbeg)

A journalist must test the reliability of a confidential source by attempting to corroborate his information for his or her own protection, a journalist may also disclose the source’s identity to a superior, while vouching for t 8he source’s reliability. Abstain from expressing any kind of opinion of a party or candidate during a rally during field reporting or an interview. The choice