By Eric Appah Marfo
Accra, Feb. 27, GNA — Mr Albert Kwabena Dwumfour, President, Ghana Journalists Association (GJA), has urged stakeholders to push for the speedy amendment of the Road Safety Act (2012) to address dangers caused by abandoned broken-down vehicles along roads.
The Act is to ensure the implementation of a compulsory towing policy of faulty vehicles.
The GJA President made the call at the first meeting of the Journalists Platform on Road Safety in Accra.
The event was organised by CUTS International in collaboration with the National Road Safety Authority (NRSA), with support from BIGRS and Global Road Safety Partnership.
Mr Dwumfour said the GJA was ready to support the amendment of the Act and urged journalists to lead the advocacy.
He said road safety was an important health and socio-economic matter, as such, any move to promote it must be supported.
Mr Dwumfour said road crashes continued to be a major problem and that more effort was needed to bring the issue under control.
The GJA President commended the NRSA for its efforts at reducing road crashes and charged journalists to up their game and ensure that preventable causes of road crashes were highlighted for redress.
Madam Mavis Obeng, Communications Officer, Bloomberg Philanthropies Initiative for Global Road Safety (BIGRS), advised journalists to embrace solutions journalism to cause positive impact on society.
Solutions journalism is a rigorous evidence-based reporting on existing responses to social problems by investigating and explaining in a critical and clear-eyed way, how people try to solve widely shared problems.
By adding rigorous coverage of solutions, journalists can tell the whole story.
It also complements and strengthens coverage of problems.
She said according to the Solutions Journalism Network, an independent, non-profit organisation that advocates an approach of solutions journalism, 58 per cent of people in the United Kingdom avoided the news because of its negative impact on their mood.
The findings also revealed that 40 per cent of people avoided the news because they felt they could do nothing about the situation being reported while 34 per cent said they can not rely on the news to be true.
Madam Obeng said journalists could apply solutions journalism in road safety reporting by identifying the issue or question of concern in road safety; asking what was missing from the public conversation and start hunting for candidates for solution stories.
She advised them to highlight the human element of crashes in their reportage, avoid blaming victims involved in crashes, avoid speculations by speaking to experts or relevant people before putting their reports together and to put their stories in context by backing it with required data.
Mrs Pearl Adusu, Head of Corporate Affairs, NRSA, said journalists had the power to set the right agenda on road safety and get policy makers to act.
She said journalists should not see road related incidents as a one off event but endeavour to analyse different aspects of such crashes for new story ideas.
GNA