According to Sulemana Braimah— the Executive Director of the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), there is sectarian responsibility for media organisations in Ghana, which he thinks has serious ramifications for media freedom.
Braimah said, the ownership elements of media houses assume a critical part in the on-going challenges faced by the press.
In a recent interview with JoyNews’ he said, most media organisations are owned by partisan people. He further complained that these media organisations are set up not so much for journalism, but rather for the matter of political publicity of driving the interest of owners.
Mr Braimah expressed that discoveries from a new findings period between May 2020 and June 2021, during which the MFWA recorded roughly 2,710 episodes of moral infringement among media outlets, nearly 60% of the violations were associated with media organisations that were overtly partisan.
“Close to 60% occurred on media houses that were out rightly partisan. So the question of ownership is a big deal if we are talking about defending media freedom. It is something that as a nation, we have to look at”, he said.
He also noted the difficulty in defending journalists, particularly those who face backlash for their critical commentary.
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He described situations where journalists make inflammatory remarks against the current government or the military, which can incite attacks or controversies.
“If you have somebody sit on the media and says that anyone who votes for the current government is a fool or is a goat and nothing happens, the person is still on air. The person says our Armed Forces, the generals are weak so there should be a coup d’état. He is a beast. And then we say we want to defend this because we must defend media freedom.”
