A new media monitoring report, the African Media Barometer, has
criticised the standard and focus of reportage of the state-owned Ghana
Television (GTV), describing its style as the “lazy way.”
According to the report composed by a group of experts from civil
society and facilitated by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES), “GTV
news go the lazy way, follow the status quo and seem still to be
mentally imprisoned by the past.”
The report confirms incessant criticisms of the state-owned
broadcaster for its inequitable representation of events and its slant
towards ruling political parties and the government of the day.
This house-style of GBC, according to Kabral Blay Amihere, Chairman
of the National Media Commission (NMC), is contrary to constitutional
provisions which require that GBC should offer everybody fair and equal
opportunities on its platforms.
GBC, which wields one of the widest media platforms in the country,
has had several occasions where its priorities have been criticized.
Last week, when an all-important Parliamentary enquiry was to be
held and broadcasted publicly, GTV declined to beam the broadcast with
the excuse of technical hitches. This move was widely criticized because
GTV was seen as trying to shield government officials who were cited
for complicity in a popular judgment debt scandal; The Construction
Pioneer scandal.
“As I read the report, I said to myself, GBC is bound to sit up and
change its ways,” Mr. Blay Amihere stated when he launched the African
Media Barometer in Accra on Wednesday.
“GTV news bulletins usually follow the hierarchy of government
institutions, with the President and Vice President leading the news,
followed by ministers in the order of their seniority,” stated the
damning findings in the Barometer, which prides itself as the first home
grown analysis of the media landscape in Africa.
Ransford Tetteh, a member of the committee that drafted the report,
explained that the report was designed to specifically criticize the
media landscape in Ghana constructively, in the hope of improving
content and standards in the industry. “We know, as the media
fraternity, we don’t want to be assessed, yet we jump onto the bandwagon
to assess others. We will only be relevant if we do this self
regulation,” he noted.
The Barometer made a series of useful observations and critique of all the important aspects of the Ghanaian media.
The FES has been on the forefront of the advocacy for democracy and media freedom in Ghana.
In the 1990s, the publication of the annual state of media reviews in
Ghana and West Africa, supported by the FES, allowed the Ghana
Journalists Association and its West African arm (WAJA), as well as
other industry stakeholders to do a thorough assessment of the media’s
performance in the sub-region.
“The barometer meets the goals of the initiative of allowing
self-assessment of the Ghanaian media landscape and offers an honest
analysis that can help us to deepen media practice and democracy in
Ghana”, the NMC boss said.
