While speaking during a short meeting with State House
Correspondents at the the Media Center, presidential villa Abuja, the
Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Mallam
Garba Shehu, blasted Nigerian journalists over controversial report.
According to Daily Sun, the presidential aide described media
reports of a fight between top government officials at the State House
as fabrications that could only have been conjured by correspondents who
would probably make better fiction writers than journalists.
Shehu who denied that there is feud between the Chief of Staff to
the President, Abba Kyari and the Head of Service of the Federation,
Mrs. Winifred Oyo-Ita, continued his tirade on the journalists in a
meeting with them Friday by branding them are mere irresponsible
writers.
He insisted that it was impossible for the conversation between
Kyari, and Oyo-Ita to have been heard by any journalist, as the distance
between the State House correspondents and the two government officials
as they addressed the Vice President at Wednesday’s FEC meeting, would
have made their conversation completely inaudible to the journalists.
Shehu said that it was taking the matter beyond what it is to
suggest that mere debate and argument over issues, translated to a feud,
a fight or a clash, and appealed to them to be responsible in their
reportage of the number seat of power in the country.
He said; “By tradition, the media organizations send their best
reporters to the State House. This should reflect, at all times on the
quality of reporting.
“I am a journalist myself, and in journalism, you are not
supposed to report anything other than the facts of what you heard or
observed directly, or what you were told by a firsthand or authoritative
eyewitness. You cannot add two and two to make twenty-two and present
it to the public as news.”
According to him, “People can debate and argue over issues, but
to suggest that there was a feud, a fight or a clash was to take
matters beyond what they were.”
Shehu also denied categorically any suggestion that the two
government officials had been summoned to see the President over the
alleged skirmish, referring to that conclusion as yet another example of
conjecture.
“Top government officials of that calibre see the President on a
regular basis. To suggest that they were summoned to see him as a
result of a so-called feud is just a fabrication, a conclusion that is
below the level of responsible journalism that we expect from our State
House correspondents,” he said.
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