Last week’s Council of State meeting, held at the Presidential Villa in Abuja, had some notable absentees among former Heads of State and ThisDay newspaper seems to be aware of why Chief Ernest Shonekan and General Shehu Shagari were not present.
According to the newspaper in an online report titled: “Jonathan Absent at Council of State Meeting”, Shonekan, an interim President in 1993, and Shagari, who was President of Nigeria in the second republic, “were apparently absent as a result of old age”.
With no evidence to back up it claims, the newspaper resulted to opinion in a news report, even when former Head of State, Yakubu Gowon, who is older than Shonekan, was present at the meeting.
It is also worthy of note that the last major public appearance of Chief Shonekan was in a video done for a greater, peaceful and United Nigeria in 2017.
The video also features late Alex Ekwueme, Olusegun Obasanjo, Yakubu Gowon, Oladipo Diya, Ebitu Ukiwe and Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo.
In 2015, there were reports of the death of Shehu Shagari, but it was later debunked and in 2017 when he clocked 92 years, a well-looking Shagari described President Buhari as “honest, incorruptible and detribalised leader.”
There has been no recent information or report of Shagari suffering from any illness or disease, and Shagari, is not known to appear in public functions generally.
ThisDay has been in operation since 1995. A fact which raises more concern as to how a media house with 23 years experience allowed an assumption fly.
ThisDay’s assumption is similar to reporting that Wole Soyinka was absent at a meeting because of his age and basing this on nothing more than the fact that Mr. Soyinka is 83 years old. Ernest Shonekan is two years younger, and Former President Obasanjo is just a year younger than Mr. Shonekan.
Understanding how a News Report is developed will also aide the understanding of why ThisDay sinned bigly.
For a typical news story, the process begins with a correspondent submitting a report to the “rewrite” desk person.
The rewrite journalist then fine-tunes the story in terms of its wordings and make sure it covers the important details and remove unimportant or false ones. He then sends it to the Editor who looks over the story, makes additional changes and sends it to the News Editors who make the final call on if this will be published or not.
In Nigeria, it is common to skip the re-write part, but this still means at least 3 persons would have seen the News item line for line and thought it was ok for a 23 years old Newspaper to say two Heads of State were not present at the Council of States meeting “apparently” because of age. All without fact or any reason for such assumption.
