Bamenda Media Personalities Restitute and Validate own Code of Ethics

By Jude Abanseka

Close to thirty media practitioners in Bamenda have attended a one-day session aimed at restituting and validating a Professional Code of Ethics for the media profession. The restitution and validation session took place Wednesday, December 18, 2019.

The session was organized by the international NGO, Doctors of the World Switzerland better referred to in French as Medicins du Monde MDM Suisse. The professional code of ethics needing restitution had been drawn up by a group of ten journalists interested in cases of gender-based violence.

The team that drafted the code of ethics

After a series of training with MDM that started in 2018 on gender-based violence GBV, journalists and media practitioners in the North West Region decided to come up with a professional code of ethics that takes into consideration the conduct of sensitization, investigation, and reporting of cases of gender-based violence.

Opening the session, the Cameroon Project Officer for MDM Suisse, George Nfor Kisob, explained that MDM Suisse is the sponsor of the document. He lauded the efforts of the team that drafted the code of ethics, noting that they exercised patients and had to sacrifice their pleasure time to do the work. According to the MDM Project Officer, it is hoped that the document would be used in journalism schools and by journalists in the field as concerns issues of GBV.

Journalists had agreed to draft a code to guide GBV reporting. MDM encouraged the constituted number of journalists who formed a team to draft the said code and present to journalists. After the team drafted a code of ethics for media professionals in reporting GBV, a host of journalists were invited to brainstorm and fine-tune the document such that it could measure up to international standards.

Preceding an article by article, reading of the draft code, a representative of the team that drafted the code of ethics, Jeff Ngawe, explained that the code of conduct was designed taking into consideration the core humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, independence and the global one of ‘do no harm”. He revealed that four different documents were studied from where ideas were gotten to come up with the proposed draft code.  He noted that the approach shall involve naming and shaming perpetrators and protecting victims and survivors. Jeff Ngawe added that journalists are not legal minds and so should use their facts and hang on the truth when it has to do with exposing perpetrators of GBV. He was quick to add that faced with such a situation, Journalists should be very tactful in order to avoid bringing harm to themselves.

The code of ethics was then read and from one article to the other, session participants debated and arrived at agreeable points. In the end, there was a unanimous agreement that the draft code was an appropriate working document. Another forum was then planned to review the document when it shall have been put in a book form.

MDM Suisse is a non-governmental humanitarian organization interested in human rights and social welfare issues. It set up office in the English speaking parts of Cameroon, following an escalation of the Southern Cameroon crisis.