FrdtidE

15/11/2021

Why some of Ghana’s private media fight corruption: reasons, rules and resources
Corruption involving the misuse of entrusted power to accomplish private ends can have devastating consequences for society. As the former United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon said,

When public money is stolen for private gain, it means fewer resources to build schools, hospitals, roads and water treatment facilities…Corruption enables fake or substandard medicines to be dumped on the market, and hazardous waste to be dumped in landfill sites and oceans.

The media are considered critical players in combating corruption. My earlier work showed that some parts of the Ghanaian media investigate and expose corruption. They create awareness, provide platforms for discussion and demand accountability.

Investigative documentaries like the Cash for Justice and Contracts for Sale also show how the media can help unmask corruption. And how they can create pressure for accountability and reforms.
But the Ghanaian media have mostly abandoned their watchdog functions in the Fourth Republic. My research has shown that parts of it aid rather than combat corruption. This is through a combination of partisan reporting and weak journalism.

My most recent research looks into why some private media in Ghana expose political corruption, and others do not. I drew on the work of Anthony Giddens, a British sociologist and theorist, to explain this.

Giddens speaks of three things that shape social actions.

individuals’ capacity to act

their reasons (interests or motivations); and

their structural environment (resources and rules).

My interviews with Ghanaian media practitioners, academics, politicians and anti-corruption activists showed the role these play in fighting corruption.

The findings show what can be done to increase the motivation for media to act against corruption and maximise their impact.

Reason to intervene
This study showed that different agents had different motivations that influenced whether media organisations exposed political corruption. These included media owners, journalists and politicians.

Some media owners and managers wanted their firms to be independent and committed to an anti-corruption cause.

A media outlet could also have a strategic reason. Most participants said some media firms sought to establish a reputation for integrity and balanced coverage. This enabled them to attract an audience and advertising.

A few media practitioners fighting political corruption were motivated by their resolve to make a difference in society. For example, an investigative journalist explained that his resolve stemmed from his exposure to human suffering in Ghana.

Another said that, despite being poor, he had refused offers (cash and kind) from corrupt politicians to silence him.

Anti-corruption activists and media experts in the study confirmed this personal experience and determination to fight corruption.

Structural conditions
Agents’ motivations for their actions were also shaped by the structural context.

Giddens argues that the most significant elements of structure are the rules and resources of institutions. Rules define and guide legally accepted social, economic and political relations within a given political community. These rules can be formal and informal and may be weakly or strongly enforced.

Ghana’s 1992 constitution has provided democratic freedoms. One respondent, a journalism and communication academic, spoke of

the enabling political environment … that allows for civil societies, the citizens and the media to work.

Media workers also said Ghana’s transition to democratic rule in 1992 had facilitated critical journalism. They said the freedoms introduced by the changes created a favourable climate to hold political leaders accountable without fear of arbitrary arrest, prosecution and imprisonment.

But the threat of violence against anti-corruption media personnel remains. The 2019 murder of investigative journalist Ahmed Hussein Suale was a shocking example.

Resources also matter. The power of social actors depends on how much control they have over material and human resources. In Ghana, the work of state anti-corruption institutions has encouraged some private media to report critically on political corruption. This includes the auditor-general’s department.

As an editor pointed out:

The Auditor-General’s annual reports reveal how some public officials are wasting Ghana’s resources. The media help publicise these reports by discussing them and demanding accountability.

These reports also enable journalists to identify areas where further investigations are critical.

Additionally, state ministries and departments help leak information about allegations of political corruption to the private media.

But the private media need resources for their anti-corruption work. A media practitioner pointed out that “corruption investigations are time-consuming and expensive”.

The study revealed that democratic freedoms alone are not adequate safeguards for the media’s anti-corruption work. Structural conditions may provide agents with resources and rules that constrain and empower them. But it is agents that decide on how to use their agency and resources to pursue specific goals based on their interests.

Thus, anti-corruption work must target not only structural conditions but also agents’ behaviour.

What next
Media outlets and practitioners involved in investigating and exposing corruption must be supported by the government, media owners and the civil society.

Participants said financial, system, legal, and security support were needed to protect investigative journalists. For example, the Ghana Bar Association can provide free legal support for media firms and personnel sued for their investigative work.

The government can set up a fund to be managed by an independent body to support investigative media. Security agencies can provide protection for media firms and personnel facing threats of attack because of their investigative work.

Without these, only a handful of private media firms and personnel will genuinely be committed to critical journalism, including investigating and exposing corruption.

15/11/2021

Climate change misinformation fools too many people – but there are ways to combat it
In recent decades, people in the UK have watched climate change shift from being an abstract threat discussed on the news to an increasingly common presence in everyday life. As the frequency and intensity of heatwaves, floods and other extreme weather events has risen, so has public concern about climate change. A 2019 poll found 80% of people were fairly or very worried, while a more recent survey ranked climate change as the most important issue.

People are more engaged with the climate crisis than ever before. But how well do they understand it? And which sources of information do they trust the most? We wanted to understand where the public gets much of its information on the topic and what the most effective ways of keeping people informed are.

We surveyed more than 1,700 adults living in the UK and found that almost half the sample were unable to correctly identify 50% of fake climate change news headlines, and almost half (44%) of all respondents were unaware of how often they encountered misinformation online. These numbers suggest that people need more guidance on how to effectively spot misinformation, and how to find reliable information about climate change.

What we found
Working with YouGov and The Conversation, we asked 1,722 people to read five real and four fake news headlines about climate change. Almost half (46%) mistakenly believed that “Scientists disagree on the cause of climate change” and 35% incorrectly thought that “Scientists believe the Sun has impacted the Earth’s rise in temperature”.
However, a majority of respondents also correctly identified fake headlines such as “Carbon dioxide levels are tiny. They can’t make a difference” (70%) and “Melting an ice cube in a measuring cup full of water doesn’t raise the water level, so melting icebergs cannot raise sea levels” (68%).

Over half of respondents correctly guessed the real headlines “More than one million species are at risk of extinction by climate change” (65%), “Earth had its second warmest year in recorded history in 2019” (62%), and “The worst impacts of climate change could be irreversible by 2030” (55%).

But only 15% knew that “Switching to jet fuel made from mustard plants would reduce carbon emissions by nearly 70%” was false, and only 34% were right in thinking that “Enough ice melted on a single day to cover Florida in two inches of water”.

We also asked people how much trust they had in certain sources of climate change information. While online influencers (6%), social media outlets (7%), tabloid newspapers (13%), politicians (20%), journalists (30%), broadsheet newspapers (37%), and broadcast media outlets (38%) were among the least trusted sources, the vast majority trusted academics (67%) and their own friends and family (59%) to convey information about climate change that was trustworthy.
A majority of those we surveyed thought accurate reporting was important, with 78% saying that climate change misinformation is very or fairly damaging to efforts to tackle the climate crisis.

When asked about media coverage of climate change, 39% claimed that media reporting overall was too abstract, with excessive focus on the future rather than the issues of today. Similarly, 29% thought media coverage was confusing, citing too many conflicting opinions (55%) and a distrust of politicians (55%) and news outlets (54%).

Finally, the majority of respondents (59%) were worried about climate change, with an even larger majority (80%) reporting a general willingness to make relevant lifestyle changes to stem the crisis.

What this means
Despite widespread awareness of the problems caused by fake news, many people we surveyed didn’t recognise their own role in this process. While large majorities worried about the effects of climate change misinformation and said that they didn’t share it themselves, 24% reported hardly ever fact-checking the information they read.

This could suggest the public aren’t sure which sources are reliable, making them more vulnerable to the very misinformation they see as damaging to the cause of tackling climate change.

Clearly, more can be done to educate people on how to distinguish real from fake climate change information. One way to do this is through a process called inoculation, or prebunking.

Just as vaccines train cells to detect foreign invaders, research has shown that stories which pre-emptively refute short extracts of misinformation can help readers develop mental antibodies that allow them to detect misinformation on their own in the future. Recent work has even used games to help people detect the larger strategies that are used to spread misinformation about climate change.

Although social media companies such as Facebook have started to debunk climate myths on their platform, politicians and social media outlets appear to have an untrustworthy reputation. This was not the case for sources with perceived expertise on the topic, such as scientists. We therefore recommend that the trust held towards experts should be harnessed, by more frequently disseminating their views on social media and in traditional media outlets.

In our survey, only 21% of people understood that between 90% and 100% of climate scientists have concluded that humans are causing climate change (99% according to a recent paper). Decades-long campaigns by fossil fuel companies have sought to cast doubt on the scientific consensus. Media messages should therefore continue to communicate the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change.

Through years of research on the topic, we have identified several ingredients for trustworthy science communication. These include prebunking myths and falsehoods, reliably informing people (don’t persuade), offering balance but not false balance (highlight the weight of evidence or scientific consensus), verifying the quality of the underlying evidence, and explaining sources of uncertainty. If communicators want to earn people’s trust, they need to start by displaying trustworthy behaviour.

15/11/2021

South African front-page stories about COVID were sensationalist and unhelpful
When the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a global public health emergency in March 2020, it became apparent that the news media’s role in communicating health information was going to be pivotal to help control the spread of the coronavirus and prevent disease.

As the world inches towards the end of the second year of the pandemic it’s useful to take a look at how well or otherwise it’s done.

Previous research has shown that media reporting about COVID-19 can influence public attitudes towards the disease and help citizens understand how to protect themselves. The media can also convey complicated health information in ways the public can understand. And it can also document the economic impact of the crisis and provide platforms for public debate about the issue.

The news media can also provide reliable, accurate information to help counter the ‘infodemic’ of abundant and often false information about key issues such as vaccines.
Trust levels in news media had been on the decline globally before the pandemic broke out. But they rebounded as people sought reliable information from trusted news outlets.

But the media’s role hasn’t been unblemished. News media has been accused of covering the crisis in a way that incites panic, speculation and fear. And failing to offer solutions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has also exacerbated economic pressures on the media. This caused staff cuts and even closures of media outlets across the continent.

Against this background, we undertook a study in which we asked the question: How did the South African news media cover the pandemic?

We found that front page reports were mostly alarmist, sensationalist and negative in tone. Moreover, these reports did not see much possibility for individual agency in combating the pandemic.

This finding is important as it suggests that South African newspapers could have contributed to public anxiety and fear.

What we found
We focused on print media. For three months (1 March to 30 May 2020), we collected data from 11 English-language daily and weekly newspapers in the country. Our study focused only on newspaper front-page stories, as these stories usually represent what a particular news outlet considers the main news of the day.

We analysed 681 stories on COVID-19, to explore the ways in which the papers presented the COVID-19 pandemic to their readers. We based our content analysis on the assumption that media can shape the public’s understanding of a health crisis, as well as people’s behaviour.

We strove to focus on a cross-section of daily broadsheets, weekly papers, Sunday papers and tabloids.

Our study included national newspapers Mail and Guardian, Sunday Times, City Press and Business Day. We also looked at regional newspapers Cape Times, The Witness, Daily Dispatch, Sowetan, Diamond Fields Advertiser, Sunday Sun, and The Star.

We found that almost half (47.79%) of the front-page reports in both the broadsheet ‘quality’ papers as well as the tabloid used an alarmist narrative when reporting on the pandemic. Reports are defined as alarmist when they are negative in tone, use fearful words and metaphors, use sensationalist and emotionally charged language, focus on worst-case scenarios, and provide limited information to help citizens reduce their personal risk.

The majority (55%) of front page reports were negative in tone, seeing very little possibility for individual agency and self-efficacy. Such alarmist and negative media coverage can amplify public anxieties and fears, instead of providing people information that may empower them to navigate the uncertainties they face amid the ‘infodemic’ from overabundant information.

Our analysis also found that most of the publications (72%) reported on the pandemic on their front pages in an episodic rather than thematic manner. This meant that reports were mainly superficial and event-oriented, rather than offering in-depth analysis.

We also found that the reporting was predominantly alarmist, negative and episodic. A large percentage of the articles also used sensationalist language. This means the specific use of words that make emotional appeals, with headlines such as ‘The war we have to win’, ‘Scramble for vital supplies’.

This perhaps makes sense, given the norms and conventions of hard news journalism and the practice of using front-page stories to attract readers. However, the danger is that readers might be put in unnecessary panic mode.

We also found that the majority (81.86 %) of the front-page reports didn’t provide health information or any information about how readers could avoid contracting or spreading the virus.

Only 3.23% of the reports debunked myths, rumours and gossip about the pandemic which were circulating widely on social media and messaging platforms. And, while the pandemic affected everyone, the voices that readers of South African newspaper front pages heard more than any other were those of men in power.

Just over half of the front-page reports quoted or cited government officials (49.49%). Almost three-quarters of these government officials were male (75.37%).

Implications
The ways in which the media report on a national and global health emergency could have implications for how society responds to big challenges and threats. Although our study was limited in its focus on front pages of newspapers, the findings nevertheless suggest a tendency to use alarmism and sensationalism to attract reader interest, without providing health information or offering solutions to mitigate their concerns.

The findings raise questions about the roles and responsibilities of South African newspapers in how they use their front pages to frame key issues, especially during times of crisis.

15/11/2021