Our Final Thoughts On Ghanaian Journalism 3

We concluded the second installment of “Our Final Thoughts On Ghanaian Journalism” series with a clamorous impetration for collective self-reflection. The point for that line of reasoning still is a strategic, relevant one. It entails, among other things, availing ourselves of the possibilities of intellection as a further step toward effective management of our portfolios of natural and learned gifts, of harnessing the conflicts between our strengths and weaknesses as fallible beings for development. This process offers limitless opportunities for overthrowing the benevolent despotism of cultural predispositions where the latter's participation in the existential experiment of man threatens the momentum of cognition in the origination of conditionalities specifically suited to man's material and spiritual comfort. This question of national self-reflection revolves around the political economy of Ghana's internal self-reliance, a topic explored in Part 2.

No doubt self-reliance constitutes an important facet of this unique social genotype of existential experimentation under man's limited oversight, which we also briefly alluded to in the preceding paragraph. We should note that we employ the word “self-reliance” with a special connotation of definitional relativity. No society, nation-state, or group of individuals can boastfully impute its existence, material or spiritual, to an exclusivist bouquet of self-reliance. At least that is not possible, even conceivable, in the scheme of our material existence. What is the point? Societies, nation-states, and groups of individuals subsist on the strength of interdependence also. Yet the political economy of interdependence does not exclude strategic considerations for political parturition of internal self-reliance, for it is the moral architecture of internal self-reliance that indeed breeds and sustains respectability.

Thus, a strategic matrimony fashioned between the material structures of internal self-reliance and the geopolitical superstructure of interdependence summons the philosophical sinews of ethnic, religious, racial, and cultural disparities before the controlling wholeness of progressive nationalism. This question has never received much attention in the Ghanaian media.

Against this background, we reiterate one of our earlier contentions that Ghanaian and African research initiatives must be tailored to vigorous trajectories of holistic appraisal of issues of enormous consequence to the methodological rationalism of scientific inquiry in the exclusive interest of Ghana's internal coherence and external respectability. We advance this question in light of conspiratorial experimentations involving Africans as guinea pigs, of painstakingly historically documented ones, both at the hands of the Western hegemony. Accordingly, we need to begin erecting scientific and technological institutions on the political scaffolds of self-reliance to undertake serious investigations into disease burdens, train personnel, design research strategies and clinical trial protocols to enhance the processes of drug discovery, and so forth.

The pandemia of Ebola should be our epidemiological guidepost and political lighthouse hence (See Donald G. McNeil's article “White House to Cut Funding for Risky Biological Study,” The New York Times, Oct. 17, 2014). On the other hand, serious problems related to informed consent violations as well as to some major American pharmaceutical companies' falsifying data on clinical trials conducted in poor communities of Africa and Asia mostly, data that had otherwise been rejected in America by the F.D.A., testing the efficacy of drugs eventually got F.D.A. approval once the falsified data made it back to America (See Donald L. Barlett's/James B. Steele's Jan. 2011 Vanity Fair article “Deadly Medicine”). Nigeria for one terminated one such clinical trial by an American pharmaceutical company because the latter failed to adhere to informed consent protocols involving human subjects of Nigerian nationality.

This is not to imply that our locally-trained corps of scientists is beyond the reach of ethical breaches as Western or Asian scientists. The arrow of human characterological fallibility is just too powerful to pierce the concrete validation of man's self-conceit. The forked tongue of Ghanaian journalism knows this fact too well. Besides, no human being is truly free from the gripping bait of greed, financial inducement, and spirit of competiveness, however sparingly distributed these qualities are across the reflective space of consciousness. As a matter of fact, the Vanity Fair article is profound in sheer analytic detail, also meeting the evaluation standards of a thoroughly researched work by two competent, serious journalists.

It is these kinds of journalists we need in Ghana, but then again, although we have the likes of Anas Aremeyaw Anas known for their peerless investigative prowess, that is simply not enough!

On the other hand, the controversy generated by the authors' Vanity Fair report underscores the need for Ghana and Africa to develop the political apparatus of internal self-reliance in the demesne of scientific and technological research as a strategic question of autonomy. Failing that, internal self-reliance becomes merely a pipe dream if a country such as Ghana, a practicing democracy and a wealthy nation at that, cannot perform basic research aimed at effective containment of the scattered epidemiology of common diseases as malaria, granted that natural selection accounts for reduced frequency of malaria in individuals who have sickle-cell anemia. It may then appear we have grossly mistaken strategic interdependence for chronic dependence on Ghana's external relations for sustenance. Then again, there is an imperative need to develop the fields of science journalism, science communication, knowledge-based journalism, and analytic journalism alongside development of science and technology in Ghana and Africa, with universal education reform accommodating the theory and practice of STEM education.

Unfortunately STEM education is not the only innovative response to poor journalistic judgments, uncritical pedagogy, and general ignorance.

Education reform modeled after the radical theories of Toni Morrison (“Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination”), Paulo Freire (See his “critical pedagogy” and book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”), Kwame Nkrumah (“Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization”), Marimba Ani (“Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior“), Cheikh Anta Diop (“Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology”), Ama Mazama (“Africa in the 21st Century: Toward a New Future”), Kofi Kissi Dompere (“African Union: Pan-African Analytic Foundations,” “Polyrhythmicity: Foundations of African Philosophy,” “The Theory of Categorical Conversion: Analytic Foundations of Nkrumahism”), Molefi Kete Asante (“An Afrocentric Manifesto: Toward an African Renaissance”), Ngugi wa Thiong'o (“Something and New: An African Renaissance”), etc., could redirect the necessary linchpin of Africa's intellectual revolution toward the philosophic cynosure of journalistic reformation, among other.

As it is, STEM implementation has great potential for transformational success if erected on strong scaffoldings of the humanities/liberal arts.

Our journalists stand to benefit immensely from these practical suggestions as well. Meanwhile, it bears reprising here that the dialectic canvass of Hooper's controversial theory, which we discussed in some detail in the previous essay with regard to the transmutation of SIV into HIV in human reservoirs, has come face-to-face with the brush of criticism from a section of the international scientific community. Yet his theory still remains a viable alternative to the conspiratorial censorship of his views by a train of science critics. That notwithstanding, there are other scientists who have given Hooper their full support and, as a result, he has remained steadfast in his scientific investigation of nature in spite of the avalanche of criticism. It also seems moral ambiguity has never succeeded in corralling his intellectual inquiries.

What is the moral of this narrative diversion? Courage! Hooper's intellectual boldness sends waves of encouraging signals to those of our journalists who do a good job of manufacturing and selling journalistic objectivity to their readership not to lose the moral character of their public validation under the Sisyphean gravity of criticism, if only the schedule of criticisms is constructive.

What else should we expect from the journalism of our capable journalists beside public endorsement of their choice journalism, intellectual and moral courage? And beside our sustained requisition for scientific and technological advancement of Ghana and Africa through advocacy journalism? Our core argument is that the dialectic makeup of Ghanaian journalism should get a little bit more scientific in its internal philosophical power, contextual complexion, and linguistic identity. A journalistic piece can therefore be framed in the sartorial comfort of a highly technical and erudite formula of rhapsodic rootedness. Preferably, the formulaic language or narrative idiom of a journalistic piece need not take on a colorful textile of linguistic technicality per se, yet it is the thinking behind or the logical architecture of the piece that should actually be scientific, although, once again, the narrative idiom could assume a descriptive fixture of linguistic formality in the particular case of the English language. This is what science communication and analytic journalism do. And to a lesser extent link journalism.

Let us critically examine another broader question implied in the preceding paragraph, an important but surprisingly overlooked aspect of the orthographic architectonics of journalistic formulations by many a reader. In any case regarding the question of journalistic rhetoric, we have made it clear elsewhere that a journalistic piece need not tag along after any strict artistic prescription, for which we specifically have in mind an image of orthographic referent pointing to a writer's artistic allegiance to or sympathy for a defined prosaic formula, as it were. In fact, a journalistic piece can be variously framed in the stylistic logistics of poetry, prose, prose poem, lyric poetry, or whatever. It may even assume the linguistic investiture of epistolary coloration. That stylistic choice is a given component of the suite of prerogatives a writer freely enjoys under the technical umbrella of artistic license. There must be corresponding creative moments of spatial articulation between writers and their readership on that score.

Surprisingly, these days some even have adapted their writing phenotypes to the genotypic genre of science, or quantum, poetry, recalling our discourse on the quantum fiction of the Afro-Guyanese writer and others elsewhere. The important point for us, however, concerns the ability of a writer to officiate a convincing literary marriage between ideational rawness and maturity of orthographic expression, this against an appreciable, or possibly passable, backcloth of a family of grammatical rules. Again, authorial allegiance or rhetoric adaptability to this family of grammatical rules may operationally be elastic depending upon style, context, and genre, among others. Thus adoption, pursuit, and deployment of rhetorical agencies such as literary techniques (stylistic devices), inverted pyramid, chunking, pagination, literary elements, lede paragraphing, etc., in a piece of literary work are subject to a writer's stylistic choices.

And much like the central issue with the economy of words, issues of sentential or paragraphic long-windedness and brevity are structurally constrained by space, time, readership and circulation, volume of information at writers' disposal, size of institutional resources, editorial oversight standards, and writers' decisional and stylistic choices.

In this context, we may have to consider one of our lingering theoretical objections to the question of literary orthodoxy. For instance, writers are not under any formal obligation to abide by the stringent rules of punctuation conventions at all times. James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Junot Díaz (Pulitzer Prize), William Faulkner (Nobel Prize in Literature; Pulitzer Prize), Timothy Dexter, Samuel Beckett (Nobel Prize in Literature), Cormac McCarthy (Pulitzer Prize; National Book Award), José Saramago (Nobel Prize in Literature), Gertrude Stein, and Edward E. Cummings (Guggenheim Fellowship), arguably ten of the world's greatest writers of all time, did not religiously conform to the rules of punctuation conventions at all times (See Mary Huang's essay “Top Authors Who Ignored the Basic Rules of Punctuation,” March 5, 2014, Qwiklit).

We may however have to recall that the history of writing may not share a mutual space of developmental contemporaneity with the history of punctuation. Significantly, though, punctuation choice conventions should not be an issue for writers while at the same time ensuring headlinese and journalese are not over-represented in journalistic outputs. On the contrary, this fact about punctuation choice conventions does not neutralize the disambiguation potential of authorial punctuation choices to bring sentential or phrasal clarity to bear on the literary character of a written piece. Perhaps our journalists may have to look at these central questions through the critical lens of Christian Metz's “scopic regime.”

More specifically, the late Ernest Hemmingway, a Nobel Prize Literature winner (1954) and a Pulitzer Prize winner (1953), adopted the literary formula “the theory of omission” or “the iceberg theory of omission” for his corpus of literary works, mostly journalistic, short stories, non-fiction, and novels. As well, his body of works is known for its rudimentary sentence structure devoid of the formulaic flavor of subordinating conjunctions. Elsewhere he freely deployed polysyndetonic syntax for rhetorical impact. Joan Didion, one of the most important literary scions of Hemmingway, also a National Book Award winner (2005) and a recipient of the yearly Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (2007), is a dedicated adherent of “the iceberg theory of omission” in terms of auctorial identity.

What is more, Maria Popova, a prolific American-based Bulgarian writer, critic, and blogger, writes of Didion as “one of the greatest writers of the past century (See her “Joan Didion on Telling Stories, the Economy of Words, Starting Out as a Writer, and Facing Rejection”).” Didion has also employed the techniques of New Journalism in her work, a journalistic genre that incorporates the powerful infrastructure of writers' emotional outlooks into their body of works. The theory and practice of New Journalism takes into account the mirage of journalistic objectivity, a point we have dialectically belabored in other essays. Finally, the writings of D. H. Lawrence, one of the influential pillars behind the English novel and of the English language, are also known for their behavioral trajectory of parenthetic authenticity. To wit, of their driftage or detachment from the structural deviance of comma splices. Therefore, the locational autocracy of punctuation conventionalism has no universal formal appeal in the interior consciousness of literariness. This point cannot be overemphasized.

On the other hand, Wole Soyinka, a renowned imagist whose journalistic pieces are not technically dissimilar to the architectonic contours of his scholarly essays, has his informative and well-informed corpus of journalistic pieces imbued with seeming abysmal philosophical depth and teeming with critical moments of logical argumentation, rich with ornate prose and with high-powered cultural and scientific and metaphysical allusions, thus demonstrating an authentic definition of enviable auctorial flexibility, of prosaic and poetic technicality, simply of peerless literary prowess in many a situation from around the world. Thus, we may loosely characterize the journalistic signatures of Soyinka and of Didion as literary journalism, with the latter's mentor Hemmingway being primarily a formidable journalist, the former a thinker and scholar.

Again, William Faulkner, a gifted writer sometimes compared to Wole Soyinka on the strength of their literary labyrinthine sophistication and profound mastery of the English language, cannot be glossed over. Meanwhile, literary journalism represents an important point of contact for the noble marriage of literary techniques and literary elements and conventional journalism concepts in the presence of the inquiring audience of human consciousness, which also means the elements of humanity and emotion enjoy a status accommodating niche on the potter's wheel of creative literariness. In a sense, literary journalism is to the structured arabesque of constructive literariness what investigative journalism and immersion journalism are to the creative Gohonzon of society's moral conscience.

As well, the range of artistic gifts exhibited is diverse and many with the aforementioned literary giants, pointing to a current of profound thinkers and scholars who sporadically, and sometimes regularly, double as literary journalists. Our journalists can learn from this pantheon of literary giants. Ideally as a statement of emphasis, we could as well splash similar description paint across the novelistic and journalistic canvasses of Ayi Kwei Armah, Isabel Allende, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison, V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and several others. Interestingly both Marquez and Allende are magical realists from the Latin world. Often, not much technical contrast is displayed in the works of writers who generally make catastrophic transitions among radically different genres. Moreover, the transitional leapfrog may be unconscious, strategically self-conscious or even calculating.

Implied elsewhere however, auctorial signature does not operate on a literary wavelength much different from the genotype of human individuation. So, aspiring journalists should learn to develop their own literary identities and rhetoric proclivities conducive to their authorial itineraries as they travel along the terrain of ideational evolution. Salman Rushdie's “The Satanic Verses” and José Saramago's “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” defined the epochal signatures of their literary controversies against the inquiring parallax of institutional and academic discontent. Like Hooper, these two courageous authors who had not been strangers to the scourge of criticism and who had occasionally endured bouts of public disapprobation learned to strategically turn negative controversies to positive ones in advancing the cause of the arts. The example of these maverick writers should be a model for our flighty journalists!

Moreover, unlike Wole Soyinka's labyrinthine auctorial juggernaut, George Orwell's called for simplicity of prose or syntax (See his essays “Why I Write” and “Politics and the English Language”; also see Joan Didion's essay “Why I Write”). But then again, prosaic or poetic simplicity or complexity is a matter of artistic choice subject to a writer's unique rhetoric identity and authorial comfort. Specifically, the question of prosaic simplicity or complexity depends on the character of a writer's target audience or general audience, either of which, in turn, depends on whether the audience character is neutral, uninformed, sympathetic, hostile, or critical. Then there are the confounding variables of audience age, education, culture, class, and psychographic indicators. We may have to add listenership and viewership to the literary landscape of Ghanaian journalism.

On the other hand, the complicated labyrinth and supremely sophisticated paraph of Soyinka's extensive writings somehow makes George Orwell's elderly advice look like a facetious, grotesque proposition. That is beside the point, however. The long and the short of it is, to unravel the enabling compass of literary templates available to writers through which to relate to their readership, specifically journalistically. The other point is to stress the extensity of linguistic or rhetoric heresies, formal otherwise, available to writers by which, once again, they are not expected to abide at all times. Another essential observation for aspiring writers to identify with regards the question of syntactic ideation as a hallmark of authorial consummation. Good, well-informed writers should be abreast of these technical and not-so-technical developments in the literary universe.

In the main, these structural flexibilities we have been discussing as regards rhetoric conventionalization, nevertheless, do not give Ghanaian journalists the green-light to pass off lame speculations or conjectures as incontestable statements of truth, as we recently observed in the national disgrace occasioned by a trilogy of stultifying disappointments: The Narcotic Control Board's (NACOB) strategic equivocation on a Ghanaian allegedly caught with illicit drugs at Heathrow International Airport, the British High Commission's partial communiqué, and the opposition's tendentious playfulness with schadenfreude politics on sensitive issues bordering on strategic national security priorities and social stability.

Then, the media's major contribution to making cocaine- and heroin-infestation of Ghana a partisan rather than a national issue is deeply troubling. Regrettably the issue of drug trafficking is, undeniably, a deeply partisan political one because partisan politics shares a tenacious overlap with national identity, and because, often, highly-placed individuals with strong ties to the hierarchy of either major political party are directly incriminated in drug trafficking or facilitate it. This is why the social landscape of Ghanaian politics is becoming such a dangerous place for serious ideological socialization on behalf of national development and political stability. Last but not least, Ghanaian journalists' partisan political impulsiveness grossly interferes with their investigational potential to tease truth out of institutions or to wait on institutions to conclude their investigations of issues of enormous importance to the public interest before jumping into hasty conclusions and uncritical generalizations, thus placing the industry on the precipice of utter destruction.

Indeed, significantly, the journalism problems such as the ones we have systematically identified with Ghana's here and elsewhere are global. Neil Gaiman, an American-based multifaceted English writer, has told the world he brought his career in journalism to a stop in Britain because British media peddled falsehoods as facts. Also, the investigative journalist Milton Allimadi (Author: “The Hearts of Darkness: How White Writers Created the Racist Image of Africa”), journalism professor Neil Henry (Author: “American Carnival: Journalism under Siege in an Age of New Media”), and linguist Noam Chomsky (Author: “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media”) have leveled similar indictments against American journalism in particular in no uncertain terms. That aside, presenting allegations, speculations, rumors, gossip, and alarmist prophecies as facts, misleadingly as truths and deviously attractive as journalistic objectivity, in the Ghanaian journalism industry can be equally deeply mortifying.

Is it not embarrassingly familiar a situation when Ghanaian journalists conveniently dissociate America's war on drugs from the geopolitical actualities of illicit drug infestation of Africa, particularly West Africa, thus shifting the epicenter of the illicit drug trade from the southern geography of the Americas to West Africa (See Charles Savage's and Thom Shanker's “U.S. Drug War Expands to Africa, a Newer Hub for Cartels,” The New York Times, July 21, 2012)? The fact is that irresponsible journalism is not an acceptable alibi for free expression, free speech, and neither is the American war on drugs a passport to the commercial heart of drug cartels. Accordingly, our journalism schools as well as professional journalism bodies should get this simple fact through our journalists' thick skulls through instructional interface with the aroma of ethical indoctrination.

This propitious asking has been long overdue for strategic reasons. Fortunately for us, there has been public clamor for our position as well as for ethical, moral, instructional, legal, and psychological review of the industry. Now, with our narrative clarification firmly in place as far as the literary constitution of journalism goes, we can discursively change the focus of topical discourse and quickly revert to some of the dialectic scaffolds of our primordial arguments. Here it goes:

But the axiology of superstition, religion, or certain aspects of cultural orthodoxies can impose undue restraint on scientific or technological explication of natural phenomena that are incompatible with religious sentiments. For instance, how does religion adequately explain the following remarks attributed to Dr. Francis Boyle: “It seems to me [the Ebola epidemic in West Africa] has U.S. biowarfare programs written all over it (See “Exclusive: Was Ebola Accidentally Released from a Bioweapons Lab In West Africa? Accidents at Germ Labs Have Occurred Worldwide,” Washington Blog, Oct. 23, 2014)”? Obviously this is not a question for religion. As well, it is not our intention to discredit religion for that matter. Nor is it our intention to hype the scientific method as a panacean approach to improving the human condition. Both science and religion have their limitations. Of course, religion has a role to play in national development but that role must submit to the secular authority of constitutional chaperonage.

We do, however, acknowledge conspiratorial beliefs and Islam as part of the general reasons feeding the epidemiological spread of polio in Northern Nigeria, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Pakistan (In Pakistan, for instance, polio vaccination (immunization) has been linked to the CIA's tracking down of Osama bin Laden and assassinating him). In Ghana some pastors warn their church members against going to school and seeking medical attention for their ailments. Members of the Apostolic Faith Church have been programmed to accept, rather gullibly, faith or divine healing and, as a result, do not take drugs for their ailments. We also cannot ignore the Jehovah's Witnesses and its doctrinal proscription against blood transfusion (whole blood). The list is endless indeed. But the issue is not always centrally about religion. Greed and politics also count in these matters. Ghana's Biosafety Law and the painful controversies surrounding the Plant Breeders' Bill, Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) exemplify the social hybrid between greed and politics.

Need we say more as a matter of fact? Yet, the moral fight against these foreign policy arrangements cannot be left to the political activism of the Coalition for Farmers Rights and Advocacy Against GMOs (COFAM), Food Sovereignty Ghana (FSG), Convention People's Party (CPP), and Ghana Catholic Bishops' Conference (GCBC) alone. The moral and political fight against these advenient policy encroachments may require the constructive collaborative efforts of science communicators, knowledge-based journalists, analytic journalists, and science journalists to communicate the divergent opinions in these controversial matters to Ghanaians. The kind of communication we are advocating will be relatively easy to realize if the general audience, meaning Ghanaians, possesses an appreciable degree of scientific literacy.

Alas, science education in the country has not received marked attention in policy decisions, perhaps, since Kwame Nkrumah left the political scene. As a matter of fact, it takes a society with a pronounced presence of scientific literacy and of general literacy to appreciate the technical complexity of such difficult and controversial topics as GMOs, etc. Thus, we acknowledge science education and scientific literacy as important as climate literacy and earth science literacy (See the following documents prepared by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA): “Climate Literacy: The Essential Principles of Climate Science” and “Communicating and Learning About Global Climate Change”).

No policy group can truly discuss the controversies brewing in Ghana over GMOs without the value backdrops of earth science (geoscience) and climate science, underscoring another reason for Ghanaian institutions to develop relevant curricula for environmental journalism, nature writing, environmental communication, ecocriticism, and environmental justice.

The question of science aside, religion may have a word or two to say about environmental consciousness. We should add that religion by way of Christianity has given us ecotheology, liberation theology, environmental theology to contemplate as the nation grapples with the impact of GMOs on environmental health and human health. Still, on the important question of religiosity and secular politics, we put forth another argument that intercessory prayers may not be a necessary panacean response to human suffering, if at all, though the human mind is, a view realizable through the creative channel of rational thinking, or common sense. Prayers, fasting, and tongue speaking may prove hopelessly futile or inefficacious in the unfolding drama of disease pandemia, as in the devastating epidemiology of Ebola, malaria, or cholera.

Stated differently, science, technology, and common sense have more remediation power in the political economy of organizational strategies than the archaic language of holy water, fasting, and tongue speaking combined. Strangely the God of our Pentecostal or Charismatic pastors and evangelists, renewalists so-called, only reveals impending doom, say Ebola, exclusive of its curative mechanisms to these self-styled earthly spokespersons of God. Ironically, these pastors and evangelists in addition make these prophetic declarations thousands of miles away from the epicenters of the Ebola pandemic in the relative comfort of their mega-churches while members of Doctors Without Borders do the hard work. Could it be that the sleeping or dying conscience of Ghanaian journalism has lost its reproaching tongue too? What has Ghanaian journalism got to say about the rapid Christianization and Muslimization of Ghanaian politics?

Besides religious charlatans are, especially, adept at prophetic articulation, where predicting impending doom more than adds emotional value to their commercial credibility, hence providing additional sources of income short of scientifically provable transcendence-derived curative prescriptions for human diseases. Still, it is religion's sometimes antithetical posturing toward the preeminence of scientific rationalism that comes as intellectually and philosophically worrisome to some of us! It is equally strange and inexplicable to understand why the more deeply religious Ghanaians get, the more corrupt and insensitive to social order they become. Has God suddenly become indistinguishable from the Devil in Ghanaian society? Has God died as Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Darwin envisaged it? Probably.

No wonder the religious, the journalist, and the politician cannot tell, quite surprisingly, God and the Devil apart on the blank pages of newspapers, on radio and television, as well as in the corridors of parliament, churches, mosques, and the so-called Golden Jubilee House! What has Ghanaian journalism got to say about these intractable questions? This may be why science conveniently shies away from the miasmic cancer of religious hypocrisy! Why has it become so difficult to tell good journalists and bad journalists apart? And what has happened to the elements of circumspection and discretion in Ghanaian journalism?

We shall return…