the likes of Gifty Afenyi Dadzie and Kabral Blay Amihere, a former vice president of the Private Newspapers and Online News
Publishers Association of Ghana (PRINPAG), Mr David Tamakloe, has observed.
Discussing Ghana’s media landscape on Class91.3FM’s morning show to mark World Press Freedom Day on Wednesday, 3 May 2023,
Mr Tamakloe, who is the editor of WhatsUP News, told Korku Lumor: “I think that over the years, the GJA has lost that stage – the stage
where it is seen as a body that speaks for journalists across the board, [as] an association that seeks the welfare of media practitioners – I
think that stage has been lost and over the years, there have been issues about credibility.”
“I mean, you saw, recently, the issues about the GJA elections, so, most of the journalists don’t feel about the GJA the way we used to
when the likes of Gifty Afenyi Dadzie and Kabral Blay [Amihere] were in charge”, Mr Tamakloe told Lumor.
In his view, journalists, in the past, “felt good to be members of the association but it is no longer like that”.
On the same show, a fellow discussant, Dr Abena Yeboah-Banin, of the Communications Studies Department of the University of Ghana,
surmised that the umbrella body for journalists may have lost its lustre as a result of a clash of different political ideologies of the leaders.
“I think, perhaps, part of what has happened with the GJA is the infiltration of positioning and ideology because if this person is in charge
and I belong to this camp and I think he belongs to that camp, everything he is doing is wrong and that’s why it’s problematic”, she
observed.
In her view, the wearing of ideological lenses by journalists must be done with some finesse so as not to colour everything with politics.
“So, doing it by itself is not problematic if we are critical-minded as a people, it’s not that much of a big deal because you should be able to
see my content and say: ‘This is how I’m interpreting it’, but we’re too, sometimes, crass about our political leanings and how we want to
wear it that we just let it colour everything”, she decried, explaining: “So, where reason must prevail – somebody says ‘a good reason
must always give way to a better reason’ – even when we’ve met a better reason than ours, because of our colouring, we insist that our
position must be the one that holds sway and eventually, it infiltrates into all kinds of angles”.
“I mean, look at the challenges these two gentlemen [Mr Tamakloe and Mr Elvis Darko, editor of The Finder newspaper] are raising about
the GJA and they are supposed to be members, but if it’s gotten to that place, it means that even when a certain law is to be promulgated
to protect journalists, the voices that should feed that law have become divided and, so, it’s going to be: ‘Is it going to help the NPP
agenda or is it going to help the NDC agenda?’” Dr Yeboah-Banin noted.
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