Every country has news consumers—and news avoiders—who are media illiterate. OJ-UGANDA’s media literacy section exists to change that. Follow along.
A day after the death of Kalangala District Woman MP Hellen Nakimuli, Mulago National Referral Hospital published a post on X refuting media reports that the MP had died at the hospital.
It said she died where she had been receiving treatment: Alexandra Medical Centre along Yusuf Lule Road in Kampala. Her body was then taken to Mulago for a post-mortem. Mulago named the Daily Monitor and its sister channel, NTV, as the outlets that reported she had died at the referral hospital.
At well-established news organisations such as these two, a clarification like Mulago’s must be followed by a correction. Ugandan audiences may not care much for corrections, but they are central to editorial integrity.
They tell news consumers that journalists take accuracy of fact seriously. When factual errors are made, they are acknowledged and corrected immediately.
Some well-established news outlets (not Ugandan ones) publish corrections almost on a daily basis. It is not because they report carelessly and recklessly. It is because getting facts right all the time can be very challenging.
The corrections communicate one key message: We are committed to getting facts right, but since we sometimes fail, we have to tell you what we got wrong and how we corrected it.
Corrections make sense to discerning news consumers only when they are done openly. Quiet deletions and changes suggest journalists are not open with their audience.
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So how did Daily Monitor and NTV respond to Mulago’s social media post? Daily Monitor has a corrections policy, and it makes corrections from time to time. But it seems it prioritises only factual errors that could lead to legal action.
So, while the newspaper can make several factual errors in, say, one month, it will not correct every error. The Daily Monitor’s website has nothing about its correction policy. Yet the website is where news consumers expect to find everything they need to know about how corrections are handled.
NTV’s website also says nothing about corrections. These outlets are not alone.
The New Vision introduced its correction policy way back in 2006 under the editorship of Els De Temmerman, a Belgian national. But sometimes factual errors go uncorrected.
A good example is the New Vision’s story about diabetes published on July 30, 2025, which attracted a lot of public attention. It cited a study published in the British Medical Journal Open. Details of the full story appeared on page 3 under the headline “Staple foods causing diabetes”.
But the story had serious editorial lapses. BMJ disowned the quote attributed to it by the New Vision, which formed the gist of the story. The Uganda Diabetes Association also rejected the story. The New Vision did not correct the error. It only ran a follow-up that walked back the claim.
It is not hard to see why local news outlets pay little attention to corrections. There is no stiff price to pay for failing to correct factual errors. Readers forget and move on.
But given the widespread fake news, misinformation and disinformation, news outlets that show readers they are committed to getting facts right may be building trust and reputation.
DISCLOSURE: The author writes a column for the Weekend Monitor in Kampala as an independent contractor. This article does not criticise the Daily Monitor; it promotes media literacy.
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