A renowned journalist and former editor-in-chief of the defunct Newswatch magazine, Ray Ekpu, has taken a swipe on bloggers in Nigeria, saying they have constituted themselves into "a problem for truth".
".....We have the bloggers who seem to constitute a problem for truth. They speculate, exaggerate, distort, mislead, quote dishonest, misleading, unverified sources or no sources at all," Mr Ekpu said on October 18 in Uyo, Akwa Ibom state, during a programme for journalists in the state.
The programme, called Retool House, was organised by the Next Edition Centre for Investigative Journalism and Gender Advocacy, in partnership with Policy Alert, and the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), Akwa Ibom State Council.
Continuing, Mr Ekpu said the bloggers "are the smear campaigners, the lynch mobs, the rumour merchants, the cyberbullies, the anonymous tipsters, the trial judges by commentary, the purveyors of propaganda, the type that America's Vice President Spirrow Agnew described as the 'nattering nabobs of negativism".
Blogging is not journalism, he said, arguing that journalism has a code of ethics to regulate the conduct of practitioners, as well as regulatory authorities such as the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation and the Nigerian Press Council.
