The president Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has said he prefers a media landscape in Ghana that is diverse in its reportage to one that is uniformed in its work as exists in other countries saddled with dictatorship.
He said his administration will not engage in media buying just to look good in the eyes of Ghanaians.
According to the President, he is “very encouraged by the continuing vibrancy and diversity of the Ghanaian media” in the nation and that the open and diverse media “is the very foundation of our democratic open society.”
President Akufo-Addo said this while addressing a delegation of the Ghana Journalists’ Association (GJA) at the Jubilee House on 28 June 2021 when they paid a courtesy call on him.
The president noted that he “will hesitate to accept any situation that looks for uniformity in the media.”
“People have tried it all over the world and it never works. It doesn’t work for a simple reason, we all think differently and the media reflects these different ways that human beings think,” Akufo-Addo said.
“I am happy to see that this tendency, this tradition, is becoming stronger and stronger in our nation – the free, vigorous, and diversified media. Those of us in public life, we should be able to take it,” Akufo-Addo added.
Among others, the GJA president registered the appreciation of the association to the president for opening the recently held conference of African Journalists leaders in Accra and also to government for the donation of the award (VW saloon car) of the 2020 journalist of the year.
The association requested of government to come to the aid of the media in the country to mitigate the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the fourth estate of the realm.
In this regard, Monney asked government to “wave spectrum and regulatory fees for broadcasting institutions for one year”, wave “corporate tax on wages of media practitioners for three months”, and “injection of oxygen into the private media to the tune of five million Cedis to help them to recover.”
“We believe that a positive response from your office will help bring the media back to normalcy,’ the GJA president said.
Source: Daily Mail GH
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