Cimas CEO urges journalists to dig deeper in their news reports

Cimas Medical Aid Society chief executive Vulindlela Ndlovu has urged journalists to conduct in depth investigative journalism rather than come up with inadequately researched reports that may end up being inaccurate, misleading or superficial.

Addressing journalists at a recent ZimSelector Journalists Insurance Mentorship Programme workshop, he suggested that many of the articles published on medical aid societies and health services had been inaccurate and misleading because they had not been adequately researched.

An important part of such research was to give the organisations being written about the opportunity to provide their input and respond to any queries or allegations that might be made against them.

He said there were many potential news stories that could be pursued in the health and medical aid sector but often they were not obvious. Journalists needed to look below the surface.

Mr Ndlovu identified as a major reason for inaccurate or inadequately researched articles, the treating of every story as a diary item that had to be completed within the day for publication the next day.

He suggested that medical insurance stories should be treated as more than daily newsroom diary items, so that they could be adequately researched. They were not the sort of story where a reporter could decide in the morning to write on something and seek to have a comment on it by 12 noon.

He pointed out that when comment was sought, it might take time for those concerned to investigate the issue themselves in order to provide a comment.

"A lot is involved in checking the facts and doing adequate research," he said.

When one of the workshop participants pointed out that a daily newspaper wanted to come out with a story quickly lest another publication publish the story before it, Mr Ndlovu said that was probably why weekly newspapers tended to come up with better stories.

He cited a report in The Financial Mail, copies of which he supplied to workshop participants, as an example of a well-researched article.

Many of the issues dealt with in the South African publication concerning medical aid societies in South Africa are similar to issues affecting medical aid societies and the health sector in Zimbabwe.

These include an increase in the amount medical aid societies are paying for members' treatment as a result of increased use of private hospitals, often for procedures that could be done out of hospital, use of specialists for health issues that could be dealt with by a general practitioner and unnecessary operations, such as caesareans being done in preference to natural birth, as well as paying teams of doctors as individuals rather than a team.

The article analyses the problems South African medical aid societies are facing, which has resulted in them running at a loss and having to increase subscriptions to unaffordable levels. It  looks at the reasons behind these problems, including the legislative framework, quoting various experts and a leading health insurance chief executive.

"It demonstrates the depth of research, a well-researched story," Mr Ndlovu  said, adding that he was particularly impressed by the data that was given at the end of the article on, for instance, the number of doctors per individual in South Africa and the shortage of doctors.

"Those statistics are available from the Ministry of Health but we do not see such stories here," he said.

 "We are urging you to spend more time investigating issues," he told workshop participants, adding that, if they did, they would find Cimas and the Association of Healthcare Funders of Zimbabwe (AHFoZ) willing partners.

He pointed out that there was often more to a "No comment" than met the eye. Further investigation might be merited, he suggested.

He illustrated the need for journalists to dig deeper and seek news that was not obvious and scarcely visible with the following quotation from the fourth edition of Media Society: Images and Audiences by David Croteau, William Hoynes and Stefania Milan, published in 2012:

"We prefer to think of media texts as sites where cultural contests over meaning are waged rather than as providers of some univocal articulation of ideology.

"In other words, different ideological perspectives, representing different interests with unequal power, engage in a kind of struggle within media texts.

"Some ideas will have the advantage, because, for example, they are perceived as popular or build on familiar media images, and others will be barely visible, lurking around the margins of media for discovery by those who look carefully."

The ZimSelector Journalists Insurance Mentorship Programme began in January this year with the aim of building up journalists' knowledge of insurance issues so that they have the capacity and understanding to report on insurance issues.