Transcript
Speaker: All right, so recording. All right, so hello, everybody. Welcome to our first episode in our four -part series on COVID -19 for journalists. I am Dr. Yemtia Kindo -Rola, co -founder of African Women in Media. And today I have with me two amazing women who are on the front line of journalism and supporting journalists as we all grapple with COVID -19.
Speaker: And in this episode, we'll be discussing journalists' safety and thinking through the role of journalists to ensure we produce clear and accurate reporting counter all that misinformation that we're getting. So good afternoon, Quinta and Maria. Would you please introduce yourself and start with Quinta? Why me? Anyway, my name is Quinta.
Speaker: Bori, I work for a media organization in Kenya called Standard Group, where I am a senior editor, but also I'm a president of Standard Group Women Network, which is a professional network that articulates the voice of women at the workplace. And could you tell us one interesting fact about you? I had a very hard time trying to figure that out, but I just realised in Compass, actually, I took character lessons.
Speaker: Okay, so you're a karate journalist. Sounds good, Marie. Don't miss. Don't miss. All right, Maria. I am the Emergencies Director at the Committee to Protect Journalists. As you may or may not know, CPJ is mostly a research and advocacy organization, but my team, which is a team of five, is the hands -on team.
Speaker: We work on providing safety information and support to journalists around the world and emergency assistance when that is needed. And one interesting fact, other than I'm working out of a very small workplace, I was trying to come up with something that could really
Speaker: I live up to Karate, but I think one of the hardest things that I've had is being out of New York has been that I only left with two pairs of shoes. That's been very difficult. So I have one of the names in secret. Thank you, ladies. We're going to talk about safety for journalists. I'm going to talk about responsible reporting because there's so much misinformation out there.
Speaker: really, really staggering. And it's really making the job of trying to curb this outbreak even more difficult. But my first question to you is, what has been the safety issues that have emerged for journalists reporting COVID -19? What in terms of your conversations with journalists, and also in terms of managing journalists' worthy safety issues that you think are emerging for journalists reporting on the outbreak?
Speaker: Well, what I've noticed, especially coming from my country and of course what we've been watching happening globally, is I see a scenario where our journalists are exposed to the virus because these are the people who are traveling, these are the people who are conducting
Speaker: conducting interviews. These are the people who have to go to the hospitals and the quarantine locations to get us the news. And if you ask me, I think next to the frontline soldiers, I'm talking about the nurses, the doctors and the journalists who are gathering information. Really, most of them cannot work from home. They cannot work from self -quarantine. And this potentially exposes them to infection.
Speaker: And we have seen, you know, live coverage where journalists have attended and they are not even observing the social distancing. Some of them do not even have the protective gear. They're not wearing the required masks. And it just puzzles me. And sometimes, you know, these are people who have to go back home.
Speaker: and they're interacting with their families, they're interacting with their loved ones. So that is a serious issue that I've seen happening, especially in Kenya and around the world. And just today, actually, one of my colleagues was attacked on his way home.
Speaker: And he sustained deep cuts on his head, among other injuries. So of course, there's a lot of anxiety happening in the country currently. So somehow that has escalated the rates of crime. So that really exposes some. I'm only worried for what might happen in the future.
Speaker: And just the other day, there was a video that was doing rounds over a journalist who was physically assaulted by a policeman. We have a 7 to 5 p .m. curfew here in Kenya. So the journalist was just doing his job and he was assaulted. Those are issues that are coming up so far. Although we haven't noticed anything happening to the female journalists, what normally happens when we have disease outbreaks
Speaker: is that women are normally more affected. And we know that existing inequalities somehow, when we have these outbreaks, they are escalated. The other thing I noticed here, Missy, is online hostility and cyberbullying. Particularly, there's one journalist called Yvonne Okora, who, what happened is about, I think a few days ago, one of the COVID -19 patients in Kenya,
Speaker: was announced to have recovered. So she came to, well, there were lots of questions because of the anxiety. There's a lot of, there are many questions going unanswered. Everybody's looking for hope and they don't know where to find it. So when this patient was announced to have been cured of the COVID -19, she experienced a lot of cyberbullying, people sharing her nude pictures and everything, everything just spiraled out of proportion. So this presenter called Yvonne O 'Quara came up to her defense and oh my God, she was trending on Twitter.
Speaker: There's so much attack coming her way, you know, based on her private life, attacking her family. So yes, these are some of the things that you're grappling with here in Nairobi. I don't know what's happening the other side. Maybe Maria can tell us.
Speaker: Well, I think you bring up a really good point. And what I really wanted to focus on is something that we've been generally talking about when we were talking about COVID -19. And it's how it's exposed a lot of vulnerabilities around the world. And I think it's really exposing vulnerabilities around safety of journalists. One of the things that I'm most concerned is the lack of preparedness that we had for something like this, the lack of preparedness that newsrooms may have had, that individual journalists may have had to
Speaker: and to have crisis protocols in place or to have conversations in place to talk about risk assessment and contingency planning, those general points. More specifically, the physical safety issues are of concern, I think, to journalists around the world. Everything you brought up is something that we're seeing everywhere from Canada to India, and it's the lack of personal protective equipment that journalists need to report.
Speaker: a lack of information and supplies to clean their equipment, for example, to be able to ensure that their microphones, their cameras, all that equipment is being properly cleaned so that they can protect themselves, they can protect their sources, but also you brought a really good point up, which is that they can protect their families when they go home. I think it's difficult to be able to stay on top of all the changing medical and physical issues that are coming up.
Speaker: Secondly, I agree with you. The digital concern is a really big one. And it's one that I think I would really, really highlight the importance of being on top of now, because we're already seeing online harassment. We jokingly mentioned at the beginning of the podcast that we're all working from home. This is an added vulnerability. People using their personal computers, sharing their computers, what kind of internet they're using. How are they communicating? That's another vulnerability.
Speaker: And lastly, I want to bring up the issue of surveillance. I think that's something that's also going, we're going to be seeing more and more as more governments are going to be using digital tracking to track people who have tested positive. So that's something that we need to be thinking about as journalists. What is surveillance going to look like and how are we going to be protecting ourselves and our sources? Last but not least, I would say it's important to be thinking about psychosocial safety and to be, you know, making sure that
Speaker: Journalists, newsrooms, editors are prepared that they're having conversations and that they're measures in place to be ensuring that psychologically equipped to be covering something that is happening to all of us. So it's at a different level than covering something traumatic that, you know, we're going into cover and coming out of.
Speaker: And there seems to be a theme here of vulnerabilities and newsrooms being prepared to tackle that. So Quinta, you're in Kenya and standard media, one of the biggest media groups in East Africa. How is your newsroom preparing journalists? How are you risk managing the situation? Are you having conversations with the government, the police in terms of carefuse and how they apply to journalists, for example?
Speaker: Well, maybe if I could just start with the measures that we are doing in our in -house measures that you're taking. Good thing that even prior to this medical emergency, we already had an occupational safety and health department at work, which basically looks at the safety issues, the health issues of all
Speaker: not just journalists, but because we are multimedia of everybody at work. So somehow we were not caught flat -footed because the department was already putting up measures like conducting training. Even prior to the partial lockdown, we already had training and there was a lot of conversation right from the top on having business continuity measures
Speaker: just in the event that something like this could spiral out of proportion. So I'm just happy that when eventually the numbers went up and now we had to take these measures of social distancing and the self -quarantine and staying at home,
Speaker: What happened is we basically moved from a physical location working from the office and just it was it was almost seamless moving to shifting the locations to our home states just to only to reduce the risks of infection.
Speaker: So, and other than that, another thing again, we at Standard Group, we already had digital platforms even before this. I think maybe two or three years ago, the company invested in a digital platform, which simply involved collecting news and posting it from whichever location, from any part of the country.
Speaker: So I would say that this scenario, what has happened is we are able to test or rather to make use of those digital platforms. I think the way they were intended to. So maybe a blessing in disguise, if you ask me, because
Speaker: Right now, we are just taking advantage of the pre -existing infrastructures that we already had. So it has just been, what is happening is now we're just mitigating any infections or any critical issues that may arise right from the time that we are operating from. So I'm actually really grateful that my organization was able to put this in place and right from the management, they were able to
Speaker: to hold this conversation. So really, the challenges are there, but they are not too many. Now, in terms of things to do with transportation and logistics, already there was a system in place. So we are trying as much as possible to ensure that our journalists, they have minimal contact using public transport and all.
Speaker: And moving away from my organization, again, we have Media Council of Kenya, which is a national media regulatory authority. After COVID -19 came to Kenya, obviously they had to put up measures to try and protect the journalists, which is one of the mandates, actually.
Speaker: They talked to the government and asked them to suspend all live coverage, which was a measure to tame the spread of the virus. Of course, at the start, there was a lot of dissatisfaction. Not very many media organizations were very happy with that because they were wondering, you know, our core business is news. So how are you going to, you know, stop us from covering
Speaker: you know live coverage yet these people are supposed to bring in the news, they're supposed to interrogate the news maker, they're supposed to ask questions, how are they going to do it when they don't do it in a live coverage scenario. And then of course what happened is they also proposed that media houses provide protective gear, personal protective gear for journalists as they cover this virus because again as I had mentioned we provide essential services and we cannot work from home. Somehow we have to get down to business, we have to you know
Speaker: do the groundwork. So how do we do it? We have to. So they wrote to government and they proposed that media houses were able to provide those protective years. What I know for sure is that
Speaker: My media organization has done that. There are communication channels and from time to time we're able to be informed about what is happening. And I can almost confirm that everybody who is not working from home, everybody who is in the field is well equipped with the gear. They have hand washing places, they have the gloves, they have
Speaker: They have the sanitizers, they can effectively clean the equipment. In fact, I think our radio stations are no longer using their headphones because that was raising the levels of exposures. So yes, and then of course they also proposed to the government to set up an emergency response team so that there was a list of media personnel. They would avail the list to the national government and liaise with appointed officers to ensure that these people are safe all the time. I have seen that happen because we've also seen
Speaker: the people who cannot essentially work from home. I think that information went out there and they're well informed. So, yes, I've seen a lot of work going on apart from, you know, the Media Council of Kenya. I think individual media organizations are doing everything in their power to ensure that the journalists are protected. You're missing. Yeah. Maria, I'm keen to pick up on this conversation around kind of online bullying and cyber safety surveillance.
Speaker: What are the kind of things that the CPJ are doing around this? The way we're approaching safety and the way we always approach safety is looking at it as a continuum of physical, digital, and psychosocial. As I mentioned earlier, we have had a safety advisory since early March on how to safely cover
Speaker: the COVID -19 crisis, and this advisor includes in -depth information on how to protect yourself digitally. Additionally, last week we published something more detailed on protective measures that you can take to protect your information and your online footprint.
Speaker: during this crisis. We also have made available our high risk team for any journalist or newsroom that would have a question around COVID -19 that includes digital security, digital safety questions. So you can reach out to them there in London and have one -on -one session or have them speak to your newsroom.
Speaker: The idea here is that we're using this crisis, of course, to create specific knowledge, to make available specific issues for this current environment. But what we're trying to do is build that knowledge so that we can continue to use it and encourage journalists to be talking to their newsroom, their editors, their peers, and to be talking to the community more at large about how to stay safe digitally, as well as physically. Yeah. And so what are some of these methods of staying safe digital via sharing of journalists?
Speaker: I mean, sure, it's a lot of the same things that we are encouraging people to do in general. So we're really just sort of highlighting the basics. Strong passwords, you know, long, strong passwords. Use password managers to create and manage your passwords. Be really mindful of the information that you're making available on social media. We all know that this day and age, journalists need to use social media, but be mindful of the personal information that you're putting
Speaker: that you have out there that you're putting out now or that you have had before so that you don't make yourself more vulnerable. Update your software. That's huge. That's a very easy thing that you can do to protect your equipment. And again, I encourage everybody to visit the detailed information that we have made available.
Speaker: So there's a lot of emerging narratives, right? Both those that are misinformed and those are accurate. But in terms of media narrative, at the beginning of the pandemic, or when we began suspecting that we would lead to a pandemic, I was interested in how newsrooms were mapping this, visualising
Speaker: the spread of the outbreak. And I had a lot of frustrations about what was missing from this map and the kind of information I was looking for as a reader and what was missing from this. But then we've gone beyond that and there's a lot of different emerging narratives. What are the kind of narratives, though, do you feel that are missing from these emerging narratives on Covid -19? I think when we're talking about journalists, I would I don't know if it's a missing narrative, but it's definitely something talking about journalists and safety. It's something that I would want to
Speaker: highlight. I'm hearing the amazing work that you guys are doing in Kenya as a newsroom, but I think often we're not talking about smaller local outlets and how they're covering that story and the importance, the huge importance of getting that very local story covered.
Speaker: and making sure that our colleagues who are covering that story are as well equipped as the rest of us. And the same goes for freelancers. You know, more and more the news is being covered by freelancers and very important stories are being covered by them. And I think it's when we're thinking about how journalists are covering COVID and the needs that they have, I think it's important to keep in mind freelancers and the particular needs that they have, which are
Speaker: They don't have access to the same type of information, to the same type of tools that a staff journalist would have. But also, are they able to continue to work? Are they still getting commissions? Are they still being sent out there to report the story that they would be reporting?
Speaker: I think we raised a very important point there about community media and local media, because these are the ones that are really having that impact in their communities, right? And I had a conversation yesterday with a journalist in Ethiopia.
Speaker: And we're talking about how accessible some of the official information is coming out about COVID -19, how accessible the language is, even for local reporters. So it was in the context of misinformation, right? So in order for the local reporter who's reporting from a small town somewhere in Kenya or Uganda, whatever, how accessible is the language being used to communicate updates in COVID -19?
Speaker: How accessible is it for them to then translate in such a way that their audiences can access it, you know? And all this level of kind of accessibility contributes to the extent to which journalists are fully able to really communicate facts to encounter the misinformation that is really spreading out in those more local communities. But be interesting to know in terms of narratives, the kind of stories
Speaker: coming out of Africa, but or rather the missing narratives coming out of Africa. Guntar, do you want to take that? You know, as much as right now, the main focus of almost everybody is just how to protect ourselves from the virus. I think that is good and bad. And I'll explain because it's good in the sense that we're able to, you know, put our mind into perspective and just figure out how to maneuver
Speaker: this new virus that we really don't know much about. But at the same time, what is happening is a lot of things are really sliding by. And as you have mentioned, in terms of accessibility of, you know, news and information, I was actually very excited when information about COVID -19, I was able to read a poster in my mother tongue.
Speaker: I think what the government is trying to do is basically to try and ensure that they reach to the grassroots level. They ensure that each and every person is well informed. And that is a good thing. I know many organizations are laying off their staff. People are living on unpaid leave.
Speaker: The focus now is on COVID -19, but then I'm looking at the post -COVID -19. What is going to happen? How are we going to recover in terms of even our economies? The impact is huge. I'm looking at just the local impact, even from where I live, because I'm unable to go to my, you know, my local store to buy anything.
Speaker: because there's so much restriction. I feel like there are so many stories that are slipping through our fingers. If you talk about the impact of the COVID -19 on, say, on gender, you know, I was trying to look for data around, you know, looking for even disaggregated data by sex, because right now what we are aware of, we have numbers that tell part of the story, like the impact of COVID -19 on men versus women, why men probably are getting more,
Speaker: affected compared to women. But how about talking about economic impact, talking about the care burden, talking about incidents of domestic violence and sexual abuse. So how will we get this new information to drive our social protection even after the COVID -19? And apart from that, most of the world was caught unawares because we are reacting to the virus. We were not prepared.
Speaker: If you're going to lock down an economy, then you must provide a way. There has to be a solution. Otherwise, other things will take place. You release prisoners. What's going to happen? You lock people down. They don't have any source of income. They have no jobs. They'll get into crime. So for me, these are some of the issues that are really missing out. As media organizations, I don't really think we have done our best in terms of the coverage of the virus, because most of our coverage has been based on
Speaker: has been driven rather by fear and anxiety. Again, that is another different issue, which I feel we really need to look at. How do we, is it possible that amidst all this pandemic, there is no good news, really? I mean, like you said, it's a lot of unpreparedness in all of this. A lot of this has also led to lots of misinformation. I mean, one of the biggest things I'm dealing with in my network on a daily basis is
Speaker: addressing issues around misinformation, you know, trying to educate people that know 5G is not causing coronavirus. You know, the amount of conversations I've had about 5G is ridiculous. And so this kind of misinformation or infodemic, as WHO puts it, is really making our job so much more difficult. So how are you at the CPJ preparing journalists to tackle these level of misinformation?
Speaker: First of all, I want to I want to echo the idea of looking for the positive stories and I want to echo the idea of looking at what comes next and how we as journalists and the media can play that role in helping move forward. I think that's an important one. But in terms of misinformation, I think there's also a big, you know, there's there's a lot of work that we need to do in terms of news literacy and helping our public, our readers understand
Speaker: how to get accurate information. You mentioned WhatsApp groups. They're great. They're fantastic. It's a really good way for us to get
Speaker: information when again focused on safety, it's a great way to get safety information out very quickly. But it's also a great way in which misinformation is being shared and spread. So again, I think it's about maybe that next step, a good next step, a good positive step is in looking for ways to educate people on how to find information that's accurate.
Speaker: how to check where your information is coming from, not just click but look at who posted the information, who wrote the article, who did that piece, what the news source is and I think that would be a good
Speaker: next step for us to tackle. And lastly, beyond disinformation, there's something else that I wanted to touch on, and that is some governments, some regimes are also using the crisis that we're going through to increase their powers, to increase their attack on the media, as you know,
Speaker: from where I'm standing from and control on information and news. And that's another, sorry, I'm going back to the negative instead of sticking to the problem. That's another important thing that we need to be thinking about. How, what that's going to mean, not just the misinformation, but the clampdown on the information that's being reported and that's being disseminated. And I'm not sure I have a good next step other than again,
Speaker: talking about helping to ensure that we're properly equipped to report and to, and to inform. I want to pick up on what you were saying earlier on about how to tackle misinformation. I think it's one thing to tell people you need to be checked, you know, doing a lot more than just looking at the headlines, but a majority of people are just not going to do that, right? So have you seen examples of how media organizations are actively trying to counter these
Speaker: misinformation. This is kind of fake news that's been spread on platforms like WhatsApp and stuff. Have you seen any really good examples that you could share? Yeah, I'm gonna take that.
Speaker: At Standard Group, we have an in -house fact checker, which is basically an initiative to combat fake news. So what you need to do, if you feel there's something that you want, you've bumped into some news and you're not sure of its source, whether it's true, all you need to do is just send an email. And that is just one way. Right now, we have our health editor for one of our TV stations. He's actually a trained medical doctor.
Speaker: And what I've loved about this experience is just, you know, speaking from a point of authority, it really gives credibility and she already understands, you know, everything about it, about the pandemic and she has the resources, she has the networks. So that somehow has really improved our news collection and our fact checking. But other than that, I think there are other fact checkers that are available
Speaker: We have Africa Check and there are so many other organizations. And then we also have tools like Viber. You know, the thing is, even the good book says that my people shall perish for lack of knowledge. The information is not getting down to everyone. I joined Africa Check and from time to time, I am able to engage with them and able to send me updates of the inquiries that they get. And what I do now, because I belong in so many WhatsApp groups,
Speaker: Any time we receive, they are called for that as received, you know, there is this information. I know it's false and the sender insists it's true and they're causing panic and fear all over the place. I call them out. And I forward the Africa checks, find out how to tell
Speaker: fake from real news or real stories. So somehow it's really manual, but you need to find out, do you? Can you verify the source? Because the moment you cannot verify a source, it means you're peddling lies and you're causing panic. The misinformation is actually fighting us. It is our greatest enemy, because when information goes out there and it is untrue, and sometimes it goes out with your label. It says the information is from standard, okay, it's here, no nation, or from, you know, WHO.
Speaker: We are the greatest sufferers because we lose our credibility. So really, we really have to figure out how to work around that. Before we wrap up, there was one other thing that I think was a consistent theme in your responses from both you, Maria and Quinta, was around
Speaker: you know, government clap down, right? So at the beginning, you talked about curfews and your staff being attacked. And then there's also Maria, you talked about surveillance and digital tracking and things like that. So how are we to navigate this new era and this way of using COVID -19 to justify this kind of acts? Sure.
Speaker: First, let me just go back to the very first idea that I threw out there, which is something that we're seeing across the world with COVID -19, is that it's really exposing weaknesses and vulnerabilities. But I also think, again, to stick to the positive, it's giving us, as Quintero was saying, a possibility to look forward and to
Speaker: find ways to do things like fighting misinformation. Obviously, again, misinformation can be used also against journalists. And we're seeing this, you know, journalists around the world being jailed on charges of publishing misinformation around COVID -19. And it's, you know, it's really becoming a way of silencing media. But now to go back to governments, I think it's about holding them accountable.
Speaker: And we're doing a lot and I think in general, the international community is trying hard to do what you were saying, do more mapping, do more tracking, make sure that we're understanding what's happening in different parts of the world and that we're helping journalists in those parts of the world with the tools and with the support that they need to be able to continue to report. It's gonna be a really long fight and just like,
Speaker: All the changes that we're seeing around the physical safety about the medical information, I think it's going to be changing all the time. The way that governments around the world may use different tools to control information and to silence criticism. So it's about staying, you know, being aware of how that's happening and being aware of what we can do
Speaker: to counter those things. And again, it's not gonna be an easy fight and it's gonna be, we're getting to be creative and to work together.
Speaker: What I would recommend is more of a collaboration, because at the end of the day, I think COVID -19 cuts across all classes. We've seen even people in top government positions being affected. So if we could just collaborate together. OK, so thank you very much, ladies. One last question before we go. We've got one minute. We're all working from home. I'm home with three kids. Quinter, I know you're home with three kids. Maria, you're somewhere in the country with your partner.
Speaker: How is that working out for you? And if you could give one tip to anybody listening right now, what would that be? I'm home with two kids too by the way, so it's crazy. Try to find a space of whatever that could be, however small, and please, please, please be safe digitally. Be sure that you're doing whatever you can to protect yourself online. Okay, Quinter.
Speaker: Oh, what I would say to all parents, please be digital savvy, be on TikTok, be on Minecraft, be everywhere. You need to have your eyes all over the place. It's all over your place, all right. Okay, all right. Do not stop looking. All right. Thank you very much, Maria. Thank you very much, Quincea. It's been lovely speaking to you. I'm going to stop recording now. Thank you.
