Cleric To Journalists: Be Dogged, Up Your Game, For Quacks To See The Difference

By Frederick Peters, KADUNA

NEWSDAILYNIGERIA: A Priest of the Catholic Archdiocese of Kaduna, Rev. Fr. Anthony Okelue has charged Journalists and media practitioners to be dogged and up their media professionalism, so that society can distinguish the wheat from the weed among them.

Okelue urged trained journalists to live above board and not to be discouraged and intimidated by those he described as “uninformed, untrained and quacks” in the course of carrying out their professional duties.

The former Director of communications made the call while speaking to media colleagues recently in Kaduna during a Solidarity Hangout with Journalists, where he also called on media practitioners to close ranks and take advantage of the agenda setting platform to impact possitively on the society.

” What these quacks and uninformed people do is to discourage us and to downplay our professionalism and our work and somebody can say since it is a free for all fight let me look for some things else to do,

” but you see, a good reason gives way to a better one and since we have been trained, we are equipped and we have the better reason,

” so i will advise trained journalists first and foremost to become dogged, and even up their game such that those quacks will see the difference clearly” he added

According to him, those who are not trained would just be moved by emotions, and ” just want to be the first to say it, even when it’s not true or true; To them, i will say you’re destroying the society,

” because what you may say, may just be the only information some body may have and act upon, and may unleash a lot of mayhem on society”

He then admonished them, ” to try as much as possible to also learn, there’s nothing wrong in learning, let’s unlearn and re-learn and then we can improve the society, if truly we are poised for positivity” he stressed

While emphasizing the need for collaboration, said ” with all of us together, if we join hands together being that we are Journalists who have been trained and who practicing we can actually take hold of the agenda setting platform that we have in the society to impact on positivity in the society,

” so that informed our coming together, I think it’s a process basically, it’s not an end itself yet, but then we are towards perfection” he reiterated