Journalist and talk show host Fatu Camara has asked President Adama Barrow to go further and reveal names of journalists he claimed came to him asking for money to write good about him.
President Barrow made these claims at one of his meetings in the just concluded Meet The People Tour.
The President did not however say which journalists or media group is involved.
Ever since The Standard broke the story, reactions around the Gambian media fraternity at home and in the diaspora have been hot and over kill, with some even accusing the President of attacking the integrity of the media.
In an interview with Gambia news today.com, Fatu Camara, the founder of the Fatu Network, said: “The allegations are very serious and disturbing to the entire media fraternity as it leaves everyone lashing their tongues asking, who could that be? So if the President makes comments like this, one would expect him to back it up by at least mentioning the names of those journalists who went to him asking for money. In the absence of that the credibility of Gambian journalists is under attack. If you look at social media right now, every kind of word in the world is being said about us. Some are even calling names; saying maybe is this person, maybe is that person. This profession is a very noble one. We cannot be doing what we have to do up to this stage for the president to come up and want to discredit us.”
However Ms Camara also observed that it is possible that President Barrow could have mistaken a PR firm for journalists.
“I hope he is not confusing a PR person and a journalist because they are different. PR firms do PR jobs for money. In fact almost every president in the world has people who do PR for him or her. And also, they have lobbyists. Was it one of those? I don’t know. Whatever it is, he mentioned journalists though. If we look at the spokesperson of the president, what is he being paid for? He is being paid for to make the president’s image look good; right? And that is the same for the office of the Press Director,” she said.
Ms. Camara, who operates a PR company in The Gambia, said her firm has no dealings with the Barrow State House.
“We PR yes, but all our clients are companies who buy advertisement space in our medium but we have never dealt with Barrows State House,” she stressed.
source: Gambianewstoday.com
