The Minister of Information and National Orientation, Mohammed Idris, has urged public officers to equip themselves with media and information literacy to avoid being vulnerable to misleading content or easily swayed by falsehoods and biased narratives.
A statement Tuesday by media aide to the minister Rabiu Ibrahim disclosed that he stated this at the second spokespersons summit organised by the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (NIPR) in collaboration with the Federal Ministry of Information and National Orientation in Abuja.
The Minister emphasized that in today’s media-saturated world – where everyone, from PR professionals to CEOs, functions as a spokesperson, the ability to decipher, analyse, and evaluate information is no longer optional but essential.
“I want to seize the opportunity of this summit of fellow professionals to draw our attention to the need to brace up and embrace what is called Information and Media Literacy, a composite concept first adopted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in 2008, and which combines the competencies of information literacy and media literacy.
“Today, in a world where everyone is a spokesperson – whether a PR practitioner or a chief executive in the public and private spaces, the imperative for media literacy becomes ever more paramount, as it equips individuals with the tools to decipher, analyse and evaluate messages conveyed through various media channels, enabling the latitude to make informed decisions and engage with media content responsibly.
“Lately, due in effect to the lack of media literacy – the inability to analyse and contextualize media content in order to verify authenticity – public officers, and indeed the general public, have become prone to the cankerworm of fake news, misinformation and disinformation,” he said.
Idris stated that through media literacy practices, spokespersons can continually enhance their ability to evaluate news articles, identify potential biases, assess the reliability of sources, adopt fact-checking and information verification mechanisms, to enable them to effectively distinguish between accurate reporting and misleading content.
The minister disclosed that in its effort to provide the platform to impart media and information literacy to spokespersons and public officials, his ministry has reached an advanced stage towards the take-off of the UNESCO Media Information Literacy (MIL) Institute, the first of its kind in the world.