GHANA'S MEDIA IMPRESSIVE — REPORT (SPREAD)

THE Minister of Information, Mrs Zita Okaikoi, has assured Ghanaians that her ministry will keep Ghana at the forefront of media development in Africa.
According to her, the African Media Barometer, which carried out reports in 26 African countries, showed that media development in the country was one of the most impressive on the continent.
Mrs Okaikoi, who launched the Ghana report for 2008, said the panel of experts who compiled the report attested to the fact that in the areas of freedom and independence, the Ghanaian media were independent from state influence.
She explained that the results reflected the great progress that the Ghanaian media had made since the beginning of the Fourth Republic.
She said, however, that certain observations in the report which called for improvement would become the priority areas for her ministry.
Those areas included the urgent need for media legislation such as the Right to Information Bill to improve the quality of media reporting in the country.
The minister said the government was currently discussing the bill and that within the shortest possible time it would be presented to Parliament for the appropriate action.
Mrs Okaikoi said another priority area touched by the report was the re-equipping of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, which she said was being funded by the government to change from analogue to digital broadcasting to enable it to realise its potential.
The Editor of the Daily Graphic and President of the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA), Mr Ransford Tetteh, said the report was a home-grown document, adding, “No one can accuse anybody of looking at the media landscape in the country with biased lenses.”
He explained that the panel of experts excluded politicians, in line with the requirement expressed in the African Union declaration that the media ought to operate independently from state and political, as well as economic, influences.
He noted that the report would be used by the GJA and the National Media Commission (NMC) to press for the reforms recommended by the Media Barometer in such areas as better remuneration and working conditions for media practitioners in the country.
Mr Tetteh commended the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FEF) for taking over the funding and compilation of the reports from Freedom Forum and other agencies that used to assess the performance of the media in Africa.