By Chinwendu Agoha (Governance/Society Reporter)
As a measure of its social responsibility contributions towards fighting the intractable menace of fake news and stories intended to mislead and deceive readers of news and consumers of information in both social and news media, the Nigerian NewsLeader Newspaper Online will be featuring on its news website and YouTube news channel, fact-checks on news, photo materials and story headlines, etc, suspected to be fake and misleading to the average newsreaders.
This fact-check initiative will be a regular feature in the NewsLeader Newspapers and will be anchored under a pen name "Aunty JVIN" by a seasoned Journalist and development Economist. NewsLeader's Fact -Check Nigeria will be based on two broad ways of story verification or fact-finding known as "critical reasoning" and outright investigation of the suspected false and misleading story and information materials.
According to the anchor person for the fact-check, Aunty JVIN, the objective of this anti-fake news and information verification, is to help the reading public in pointing out inherent flaws in a piece of story or information by empowering them with the facts and correct information that will liberate the minds of the readers from fake and substandard information materials.
"Fake stories are designed by its purveyors to disinform, deform, disempower, disorientate and encourage mass ignorance, especially among the reading public, which, in one way or the other, affects them", says Aunty JVIN, adding that "there is urgent need to properly educate and inform the readers since it is said that information is power". NNL.
