Olisa Agbakoba, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), says media organisations can only project election winners using results uploaded to the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) Result Viewing Portal (IReV).
He also said such projections must be properly sourced and
attributed.
Agbakoba spoke on Wednesday during an appearance on Arise
Television, while discussing INEC’s cautionary note on election results
publication by the media.
On October 6, Joash Amupitan, INEC chairman, cautioned media
platforms against independently announcing election results, saying the
Electoral Act stipulates guidelines for collation announcements.
“Resist the declaration of privately collated results
because under the Electoral Act, the authority to declare result rests
exclusively with the commission,” Amupitan said.
He also urged newsrooms to establish fact-check desks, use
digital forensic tools, and verify election-related information with INEC
before publication.
During the conversation, Agbakoba said while the press is
free to publish results, it must base its projections on results from the
electoral process rather than go rogue.
“You cannot say, ‘I’m projecting Agbakoba as a winner’
without attributing. There must be attribution,” he said.
Agbakoba cited international best practices, with global
media platforms like CNN often projecting winners based on publicly available
election outcomes.
“If you watch international media… when CNN projected Obama,
CNN went to the (magic) board. ‘We project Obama as the winner based on the
outcomes,’” he said.
“The key here is that you can’t go on a frolic of your own
and say here are the results.
“The results must be figures obtained from the process and
INEC has a source of information flowing from EC8A up to EC8E. That’s what it
says.”
Advertise on NigerianEye.com to reach thousands of our daily users
No comments
Post a Comment
Kindly drop a comment below.
(Comments are moderated. Clean comments will be approved immediately)
Advert Enquires - Reach out to us at NigerianEye@gmail.com