FEO Alleges Discrepancies From FijiVillage

The Fijian Elections Office (FEO) yesterday alleged major discrepancies in the statements released by news outlet Fijivillage. The discrepancies were said to appear in an article published by Fijivillage News Editor, Vijay Narayan on Tuesday.

According to Supervisor of Elections Mohammed Saneem, the article was titled ‘Saneem clarifies that the FEO will have workshops and meetings in any venue available to the FEO, Supervisor questions the motives of Fijivillage’.

In a statement, Mr Saneem claimed that the picture in question was published by Fijivillage in 2018 with the caption reading ‘Live from the Fiji Elections Office Counting Centre’.

“The Fijivillage in their article yesterday (Tuesday) admitted that the photo was actually taken outside the Results Centre. The Count Centre was located in the carpark of the National Gymnasium while this photo is inside the National Gymnasium. If Fijivillage had seen that the photo had been wrongly captioned since 2018, they ought to have issued an apology and a correction in any of the years post 2018, but they have failed to do so until they were pointed out during Monday’s press conference. The question is why now?” Mr Saneem said.

“When it comes to the Fijivillage news, there seems to be a desperate urgency to publish, without balance or accuracy – most statements that are detrimental to the credibility of elections. The four years of misleading its audience and the countless times the wrongly captioned picture has been circulated on social media is evidence of the irresponsible behaviour of the news organisation.”

Clarification

Fijivillage News Director Vijay Narayan yesterday clarified that they did not put up a picture of the Supervisor of Elections and the FijiFirst General Secretary.

“Our elections coverage team was reporting live from the counting centre outside the FMF National Gymnasium and the National Results Centre during the 2018 General Elections, and never put a photo up of the Supervisor of Elections and the FijiFirst General Secretary,” Mr Narayan said.

“We would like to clarify that there was a video report from the counting centre talking about the latest results, the FijiFirst General Secretary coming by the counting centre, having a brief interaction with the Supervisor outside the National Results Centre and then going to the Results Centre where other party representatives were also observing the process. The footage was taken by our 2018 elections camera crew.

“The photo being talked about by the Fijian Elections Office is not a screenshot taken and published by Fijivillage.”

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