Media must be incorruptible to hold leaders accountable - Ashigbey
The Managing Director of the Graphic Communications Group Limited (GCGL), Mr Kenneth Ashigbey, has underscored the need for the media to police themselves, so that they can assume the moral high ground to hold leaders in all spheres accountable.
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He said the media should be self-correcting and pass the incorruptible test to be able to hold leaders accountable to the people.
Mr Ashigbey was addressing media owners, practitioners, as well as key players in the industry, at the Graphic-Star-Ghana Roundtable on: “Media Ethics and Transparency in Frequency Allocation”, in Kumasi yesterday.
He said the media, acting as a fiduciary body on freedom of expression for the people, especially the voiceless in society, had to drive the agenda of ensuring that leaders were held accountable.
He expressed worry about the over-commercialisation of the media and the unbridled partisanship that seemed to colour the views expressed, paticularly on radio.
Media tyranny/operation
Mr Ashigbey spoke against media tyranny and operation which, he said, were at variance with the ethics of the profession and mostly tended to favour media owners.
“These days news items on radio, especially when it comes to rape, have been turned into drama. Certainly this is not what we have been taught in school and we need to check it,” he told the participants.
He said the practice, more often than not, had led to the distortion of facts, a situation which was an affront to the principles underpinning the profession.
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Mr Ashigbey called for a re-examination of the allocation of radio frequencies “because sometimes some media owners do no merit them”.
Rwandan experience
For his part, the Director of Newspapers of the GCGL, Mr Yaw Boadu-Ayeboafoh, explained that the demand for transparency in the allocation of radio frequencies was just to ensure accountability and prevent the mayhem that engulfed other countries from occurring in Ghana.
He cited the Rwandan experience in which the media were accused of stoking ethnocentric sentiments that culminated in the killing of nearly one million Rwandans.
According to him, the radio station that did that belonged to the then Rwandan President and his wife, while the generator that powered that radio station was from the Rwandan President's house.
He said it was based on lessons from the Rwandan experience and the fact that people who spoke on radio represented the voice of the ordinary people that there should be more transparency in the allocation of frequencies.
Mr Boadu-Ayeboafoh cautioned journalists against the incessant breaching of media ethics and the violation of the rights of Ghanaians.