Don’t be propaganda tools for politicians - Ghanaian media urged
A lecturer at the Department of Communications of the University of Ghana, Professor Kwame Karikari, has urged media practitioners not to allow themselves to be used by politicians as political propaganda tools to disturb the peace and stability of the country.
Advertisement
According to him, election-related conflicts often emanated out of the inordinate passion on the part of the government in power, as well as the opposition, to win elections at all cost.
Motivated by such inordinate passion, he said, politicians would go to any length to cook up situations and other false indicators in the hope that the media would play a facilitating role by disseminating them to incite public sentiments.
Prof. Karikari said this when he delivered a keynote address at a day’s workshop organised by the Ghana Independent Broadcasters Association (GIBA) for members of the association in Accra yesterday.
It was supported by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and was on the theme: “Responsible reportage for Election 2016”.
Media must be critical
He said the media, towards this year’s general election, ought to be very critical in the handling of electoral processes and arising security matters.
He advised that if at any point both the government and the opposition decided to divert attention from real issues to “spurious security threats” and the media failed to exercise circumspection but chose to dwell on them, it would lead to cynicism on the part of the ordinary people.
“Therefore, when the real security threats emerge, the cynicism created by the reports of the spurious security threats will not augur well for a proper handling of the situation at hand,” he explained.
Other Trending Stories
He advised that in such situations, the media, instead of taking sides, must remember that their foremost obligation was to the people of Ghana.
Prof. Karikari also cautioned against taking official government statements on their face value without probing, saying, “We seem to have smuggled the culture of not questioning authority into journalism.”
Government statements
Journalists, he said, must be bold to question statements emanating from official government sources to ensure that what they contained was the truth and not half-truths or lies.
If the media failed in the quest to inform the public, they would have failed in their corporate mandate to help build an informed public that would make the right electoral decisions, he said.
He, therefore, called on the media to inform clearly and educate adequately in the quest to promote democracy and the national agenda.
The Chairman of the National Peace Council (NPC), the Most Reverend Prof. Emmanuel Asante, said even though the media had played a credible role since the onset of the country’s democracy, that should not blind Ghanaians to the dangers posed by a few powerful media owners who tended to manipulate and distort facts for sectional and pecuniary reasons.
‘Be mindful of your reportage’
The President of GIBA, Mr Akwasi Agyemang, said there was something wrong with the way the media tended to create tension during election years which ought to be addressed, saying: “We need to report in a way that salvages the peace that we have.”
The Country Director of the UNDP, Mr Dominic Sam, said the UNDP was committed to Ghana’s democratic development and would provide support to make the 2016 elections successful.
A Deputy Electoral Commissioner, Ms Georgina Opoku Amankwah, urged the media to be professional in all they did in order to protect the integrity and sanctity of the electoral process.
A Commissioner of the National Media Commission (NMC), Dr Doris Dartey, said the nervousness that characterised election in Ghana was disturbing, adding: “I hope this nervousness about elections would stop sooner than later because it is nerve-wracking.”