Journalists performance at media encounter unacceptably poor - expert jabs

A communications lecturer has said the performance of journalists at this year’s Meet the Press at the Flagstaff House with the President was unacceptably poor.

Esther Armah said the poor sentencing and problematic backgrounding to questions were the direct results of poor journalistic work.

Contributing to discussions on Joy FM's Ghana Connect Friday, she said the quality of questions should have been improved after last year's encounter.

“At the first encounter, there were important lessons to be learned…but our refusal to learn them is symptomatic of bigger issues of our failure to take issues seriously.

“When you encounter the president, it is a moment to do something that is rare…the president should come out sweating…it should be an absolutely extraordinary encounter on behalf of the people,” she said.

The quality of questions journalists asked the President dominated discussions on social media after the media encounter last Wednesday.

Media development and freedom of expression advocacy organisation, the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA),con selected three out of a total of 20 questions asked and graded them.

According to the Foundation, it made the selection based on basic principles of good questioning like "relevance of the question; whether a question was a leading question; whether the question had good background and context; the clarity of the question and whether a question made references to data, facts and illustration."

For some critics, the encounter has exposed how terrible journalists are when they should be on top of issues.

Although Armah thinks some great questions were asked, she said, “when there are 20 questions and you can only really articulate three that were strong, that means it was an unacceptably poor performance.”

The communication lecturer said the poor performance should be named as such in order to critically analyse what was poor, why it was poor and what must be done to improve it. 

"We missed an important opportunity and we cannot keep missing such opportunities."

For his part, Moro Awudu, morning show host on Class FM said he has a difficulty disagreeing with Armah. 

He said journalists failed to ask the questions the general public wanted them to ask, but disagreed with the "unacceptably poor" description used by the lecturer.

Listen to the audio below:

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