MFWA organises forum for political commentators
The Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) has organised a forum for political party commentators to deliberate on emerging issues in election campaign communications and ways of contributing to peaceful elections through a decent language campaign.
Advertisement
On the theme: “Promoting decent language and issues-based campaigning for peaceful elections in Ghana”, the forum formed part of the foundation’s campaign language monitoring project dubbed: “Issues not insults”.
About the project
Under the project, the MFWA and its team will, on a daily basis, monitor and track indecent expressions used by politicians and activists on selected 70 most influential radio stations across the country from July to December 2016, with reports being issued every two weeks.
They will also monitor and report on how moderators on the selected stations handle their programmes and whether or not they allow their platforms to be used to abuse others.
It will also name and shame users of hate speech and indecent expressions, while educating the public on the avoidance of hate speech and indecent campaign language, and advocate professional media conduct that fosters issues-based discussions.
The project is being implemented with funding support from Open Society Initiative for Western Africa (OSIWA), STAR-Ghana and the European Union through Socioserve Ghana.
Stakeholder support
Addressing the gathering in Accra, the Executive Director of the MFWA, Mr Sulemana Braimah, said the project had, since its inception in April this year, received widespread commendation from the media, civil society organisations, political parties, among other groups.
Based on the project, however, he said, people continued to raise the issue of what an insult was, what was categorised as an unsubstantiated allegation, hate speech and incitement.
Other Trending Stories
Mr Braimah said although those were legitimate questions, it was important to highlight the fact that the project was not being executed by the MFWA alone but rather with support from other stakeholders in the media, academics from the Linguistics Department of the University of Ghana, experts in the local languages from the Bureau of Local Languages and the political parties.
Mr Braimah, therefore, urged all political parties, the media and other stakeholders to, at all times during their political discourse, use decent language to ensure sanity on the airwaves.
Not a censorship project
Touching on speculations that the project was infringing on the right to free speech, as well as censoring the selected radio stations, Prof. Kwame Karikari, an academic and former Executive Director of MFWA, said the foundation, as a ‘citizen’ of the country, had every right to express its viewpoint on everything and anything that an individual did or said, adding, “This is what our democracy is about.”
“The exercise of the foundation is purely a public intellectual activity and as such its findings cannot suggest that an individual loses his or her right to freedom of speech.
“So it’s a public intellectual activity. Our work here is not final. We do not claim to have the last truth but we want to build a culture of tolerance and free expression where people can give and take without resorting to uncivilized methods,” he said.
The Chairman of the National Media Commission (NMC), Mr Kwesi Gyan-Apenteng, in his remarks, urged all politicians and the media to do their part to educate the public on what matters the most and how the country’s resources were being utilised during their discussion programmes.