SECTOR 4 4.1 The standard of reporting follows the basic principles of accuracy and fairness There was a consensus amongst panellists that the standards of reporting have improved over the past few years, however, it was noted that there is still a great deal of room for improvement. Issues such as unbalanced one-source stories, misquotes, exaggerated headlines, spelling and grammatical errors, lack of in-depth analysis and so forth, continue to mar reporting standards and are among the issues that panellists raised in the discussion of this indicator. A civil society panellist noted that stories often lack accuracy, causing those called on for comment to be hesitant to share their views. ‘The level of accuracy is questionable and you don’t know if you should comment or not because [you] don’t know what will come out at the end of the day. In some cases, the media focus on one thing that the person said but don’t provide the gist of the real story. Their headlines can also be very misleading.’ Another panellist noted, ‘There’s room for improvement. There are glaring mistakes that have come up now and then, and you find that some publications have set aside page two for corrections, retractions and the like.’ Some of these mistakes can be as simple as getting names right. ‘Sometimes journalists call and interview you on the phone, you provide information and then they end up getting names and titles wrong.’ ‘I notice a lot of imbalance in stories. For example, you can have one source stories that do not include the perspective of the other parties. You find that in some cases, the other party not interviewed in the story has to make enquiries from the reporter to correct the story and so forth and this is not fair to either party.’ Panellists from the media agreed with the civil society perspective that much room for improvement remains. ‘In all honesty, we can improve our balancing. There’s an emphasis on being salacious and in the process of trying to grab people, we lose the essence of the story.’ ‘Journalists don’t try hard enough to balance things and I’m not quite happy with what we produce sometimes. Follow-up of stories are lacking. We had reports about the shortage of food at the hospitals, for example, but there was no follow-up.’ ‘For a long time, people have been complaining that there is no value in buying [news]papers. They recall with fondness the times of older editors when the standards were high. I’m not sure if this is just some kind of nostalgia. But we need to make sure we carry stories through and reporters need to sharpen their skills on this. They need to be able to milk the story dry so that readers get all 45 AFRICAN MEDIA BAROMETER ESWATINI 2018