Segun Atanda/
Broadcast journalist, Kadaria Ahmed, has been lampooned for criticizing a BBC exposé on terrorists’ activities in Northwest Nigeria.
Kadaria, the CEO of RadioNow 95.3FM was bashed by a popular newspaper columnist and United States-based professor of Journalism and Emerging Media, Farooq Kperogi.
Kperogi, in a post on his social media pages on Friday, said Kadaria’s attempt to demonize BBC and Daily Trust over the report that exposed how terrorists operated freely in Zamfara was uncalled for.
Kadaria, who started her career at the BBC in London, described ‘The Bandit Warlords of Zamfara’ documentary by the BBC as “irresponsible reporting”.
BBC recently x-rayed banditry in a 50-minute documentary, providing insight into the mindset of bandit kingpins, the booming kidnap-for-ransom industry, and how Zamfara’s insecurity may have been brought on by the ethnic conflict between Hausa and Fulani groups.
Kadaria, in an opinion article published on Thursday, stated that the BBC Africa Eye may be charged with aiding terrorism because it “provided” a platform for terrorists to express their extreme views.
Her words: “Journalists and now a global media organization of repute, the BBC, which should know better, are becoming a tool for terrorists, even if unwittingly, by amplifying the faces, voices, and stories of killers and marauders who are still operating with impunity across Nigeria.
“The public interest argument seems to have been misunderstood, some may even say misrepresented, to enable sensationalist reporting that is very unlikely to be allowed on screens in the United Kingdom. By not upholding the same standards as they would in the UK, in their work in Nigeria, the BBC Africa Eye producers in their latest documentary titled ‘The Bandits Warlords of Zamfara’ have provided a global platform to terrorists and can be accused of becoming an accomplice to terror in the name of reporting it.”
Responding, Kperogi said, “Kadaria Ahmed is my senior in the profession for whom I have tremendous respect not only because of her matchless brilliance but also because of the record she set at Bayero University’s Department of Mass Communication from where I also graduated years after her.
“But her fuzzy attempt to criminalize BBC’s—and Daily Trust’s— praiseworthy investigative reporting on the heartrending terroristic banditry in Zamfara, her home state, which gave the inept federal government the justificatory lifeline it needed to muzzle the media is a huge disservice to the profession.
“If I were her, I’d be ashamed of that article.
“She is more worried about the uncomfortable truths revealed in the BBC report, which most of us already know and which journalists are professionally obligated to report, than the government’s crying ineptitude.
“If you don’t like what you see in the mirror, breaking, covering, or ignoring it won’t change anything.
“If the horrors of terroristic banditry weren’t ignored or covered by the government, reporting on it wouldn’t have come across as glorification of banditry. It isn’t light’s problem that it reveals what’s in the dark.”
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