By: Sainabou Sambou
Sixty students have on Saturday 12th March 2022 graduated and are now ready to add value to the field of journalism courtesy of Gambia Talents Promotion. The institution which provides practical journalism training seeks to improve the quality of media practitioners across the country.
Muhammed S Bah is President of the Gambia Press Union he said Journalism is a noble course. If you look at our constitution in section 207 he said it states that journalists should hold the government accountable. This means if you are a journalist, you have a duty to make a platform for people to get divergent views/ information.
Adding that journalism is a career because the world is progressing and journalists play a significant role in sharing, creating and shaping society.
“Journalists are expected to create fair opinion because they are committed to finding the truth and presenting the facts, the news is a function in people’s life it is like food because information is very important, information is powerful and creates awareness and also empowers people to live a decent life,” he said.
He added that the world for journalism has now expanded because we have seen citizen journalists. These he said are people who will just sit in their corner and pretend to be a professional journalist and most of the time misinform the public.
Ebrima Sillah is the Minister of Information, he told the grandaunts that a pen and a microphone in the hand of a wrong and untrained person is more dangerous than an AK 47 gun.
He said words written or produced can travel very far and they leave ink for the rest of a person’s life. When a bullet hits a person, he says it does damage the person instantly, words on the other hand stay forever.
“In today’s environment, everyone with a smartphone who has an internet connection is potentially an independent producer and a distributor of news, even if it’s false news,” he said.
Fatoumatta Bah Barrow the First Lady of the Republic of the Gambia advised the grandaunts that they should be careful with how they use words, as words are very dangerous.
Adding that in this era of smartphones people easily tarnish each other’s image.
“If someone tarnishes another person’s image or reputation that person will never recover from that pain for the rest of his or her life,” she said. Adding that she will support the Gambian Talents Promotion starting this year.
Fatou Samba Country Coordinator of the Gambian Talents Promotion said Gambian talents is a youth founded and led non-profit organization that provides training and employment opportunities to underprivileged young people of the Gambia.
She said their program is unique as their primary beneficiaries are school dropouts, migrate returnees locally known as backway deportees, fresh high school graduates who don’t meet the basic requirements to gain college admission, students of Madrassa (a Muslim school, college, or university that is often part of a mosque) and university students who want to gain practical training in the field of journalism.
