Soft Control of Media in Kufuor's Ghana?

SOFT CONTROL of the Ghanaian press rests on more than cash payment. Up and down the government-corporate media nexus, the careers of individual journalists can be made or broken with a phone call. A suggestion from a ministry official or an observation by a CEO or station manager may be all it takes to end or jump-start a career. On the street in Accra, I run into a young television reporter I knew when I observed the work of Ghana's National Reconciliation Commission in 2003-2004. For eighteen months, this man fretted that reporting on details of the truth and reconciliation hearings would ruin his career. In June 2003" he lamented, "If my reportage seems to satisfy this government, what happens should another party rise to power? I'll be blocked from promotion. This is why I would rather be covering sports." As he would be the first to admit, his reporting on the hearings was factual but trite. Now he delightedly tells me that he has become a sports reporter. His station has given him the opportunity of a lifetime, reporting on the soccer tournaments, African Cup of Nations, hosted this year by Ghana. "You must have covered the reconciliation hearings just right," I say. He smiles broadly. "Around here a journalist always has to be knowing how far he can go."

A media system that is private, commercial, but acutely aware that it serves a nation bound to the state-in other words, a "normal" media system in our neoliberal age-is constantly but softly controlled by the interests that it serves. Government admonishment of Ghanaian journalists is always wrapped in the flag. In early January, the current minister of information told the press, "Although you have sometimes been critical of government, you have really enriched good governance in this county. While I urge you toward greater professionalism and accuracy, I assure you all that this government appreciates your contribution and will continue to work with you to ensure the preservation of your freedoms and the protection of your rights." Journalists understand that such words are both hortatory and cautionary. They also understand that if they do not heed calls to shape up, their work may draw the ire of the National Media Commission, which sets ethical guidelines and broadcast standards, monitors news content, and enforces the right of persons offended by press reports to reply. Consequently, in the words of Kofi Nyantaki, general manager of TVS, "Ghana's press is like an old man. We gum the government but never bite it."

IN THE WEST, the enticements that the powerful offer the press and the obstacles that governments and others put in the way of the search for truth are a familiar part of the cat-and-mouse game of effective reporting. They slow and sometimes suspend the flow of accurate information, but the system is supple enough that one way or another the questions that give traction are asked. In Ghana, as in most of Africa, journalists find soft control efforts more vexing. This is so for two reasons: their own relative poverty (in countries such as Ghana, salaried people typically support extended clans of the unsalaried), and the suspicion common in new democracies that new methods are a quiet cover for repressive impulses that may soon return. So the small questions-Mr. Minister, could you please describe the system used for allocating contracts? Mr. Mayor, which roads are scheduled for repairs this year?-tend to be avoided. That is how mediasavvy government and business officials triumphantly and softly control the press.

They will continue to do so until Ghanaian reporters are convinced that it is safe for them to press the powerful. There is nothing particularly outrageous in the scale of goods and services now proffered to journalists by government and business. Soft control efforts in Ghana are well within the range of the normal limit-stretching public relations methods found in neoliberal democracies, old or new. Yet, a non-African encountering soli and other small enticements and obstacles in Ghanaian journalism is likely to consider them confirmation of the ugliest bit of received nonwisdom that the West carries around about Africa: that on the African continent, corruption is endemic. In fact, soli and all forms of soft control are normalcy. They tell us that the condition of the press in countries such as Ghana is more and more like its condition in London, New York, and Washington, D.C., where spokespersons, communications officers, media outreach budgets, and revolving doors of businesses and government agencies win favorable press coverage with ease. The difference for now is that Western reporters have room to negotiate soft control, while Ghanaian journalists still struggle to do so.

"Government has learned from other African countries what the international community can and will tolerate and what will hurt our rating on the developing country star scale," Clegg says. Soft control, then, has all the advantages under the new political-economic order: It appears consistent with democracy and works well within (and for) a liberalized market economy. The hard control of the past, outright banning, direct censorship, visits to newsrooms by military, and jail, was made for dictators and is dying with them. Soft control is a sign that the African information economy has joined the world. What we await are conditions that will allow media organizations and reporters to stand up to it.

Fallout

If control of the press is becoming soft and "normal" in democratizing African countries such as Ghana, is it inevitable that other features of the Western press will take root there, too? Many Ghanaian journalists are troubled by a development that Attah calls "a culture of hurling insults" and "sensationalized screaming." He asks, "Is this what we get with a globalized, commercialized, privatized media system? Attacks on human dignity? It's not Ghanaian." Indeed, apparent cultural borrowings from the tabloids, talk radio, and cable television rants may or may not be temporary adjustments to growing media pluralism in Ghana.

As soft control is embedded, as government officials, business executives, media managers, and journalists swing back and forth through the revolving doors that connect their sectors, as the news becomes ever more subtly managed and manipulated, as reporters struggle to fight soft control, who will bite government, who will probe business? The answer, fascinatingly, may be the people. Unlike reporters, newspaper readers, Web site users, and callers to radio and television programs feel they have considerable freedom to talk back, to reply to the events of the day and the press's coverage of them. They are beginning to take full advantage of this freedom.

Bloggers as well have little to fear when they write frankly about public affairs. Mostly based for now in the Ghanaian diaspora-the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands-Web sites and news blogs such as Ghanaweb, Modern Ghana, and Deceit in Ghana, feature reasoned commentary and diatribes by Ghanaians watching their country from afar. No doubt, under pseudonyms, journalists working in Ghana are also writing on these blogs.

[Author Affiliation]
JO ELLEN FAIR is a professor of journalism and director of the international studies major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a coeditor of The Art of Truth-Telling About Authoritarian Rule (2005). She works on media and popular culture in urban Africa and currently is writing about advice columns, online dating, and changing notions of love, romance, and marriage in Ghana.