SECTOR 4 The media practise high levels of professional standards. 4.1 The standard of reporting follows the basic principles of accuracy and fairness. Political and social information processing makes abundant use of “more or less / about / around”. The conditional mood is frequent in the narration of facts. The titles of certain newspapers are “pompous” but the articles are vapid. The panel expressed reservations about certain press reports. Several members said that they took the content of certain articles “with a pinch of sal”. An example of the lack of professional rigour in the processing of information is that of a former minister and Member of Parliament, whose university degrees were called into question by a newspaper. It had also been stated that the universities concerned were prepared to attest to the facts. After several meetings between the minister and the newspaper, the following issue of the newspaper took the diametrically opposite position to that of its earlier revelations: the minister accused first of having no qualifications had become, overnight, in the columns of the same newspaper, the most competent personality in the Republic. The publisher of the same newspaper would go on to become the director of communications of the said former minister. A high-ranking police official attempted to make public his version of the facts surrounding his imprisonment. He contacted a newspaper who interviewed him in exchange for a sum of money. The same journalist contacted the other highranking official involved in the same case and, for double the sum of money, agreed not to publish the article. These two examples convinced the members of the panel that many articles are prepaid or commissioned with a view to manipulate opinion. Every Wednesday and Friday, the court hears several cases of direct proceedings against journalists. This trend will grow, according to the panel, as long as some journalists refuse to report the facts accurately and completely. The failure to distinguish between the facts and commentary on those facts is a problem for the panel. On radio, the new practice of “pooling” (“mutualisation”) is decried. This consists, for example, of three journalists using the same interview, recorded by one of them, who then receives the expenses reimbursed to the other two for transport (as though they had been present), and passes on the same cassette/interview for broadcast or publication. It is a form of solidarity in information collection but which is far from ethical, since it is based on claiming fictional transport costs and per diem. One also sees what one panellist called “Siamese newspapers” which publish the same articles, reproducing the same mistakes and errors. 98 AFRICAN MEDIA BAROMETER BENIN 2014