Ghana President warns media organizations over deliberate churning of inaccurate information

The deliberate churning out of inaccurate information by the media has the tendency to undermine the sustainability of Ghana’s democracy, President Nana Add Dankwa Akufo-Addo has warned.

President Akufo-Addo noted that the penchant and desire of some media organizations to be the first to break the news without recourse to the verification of facts was a bane on the country’s fledgling democracy.

Speaking at the 12th Congregation of the Ghana Institute of Journalism in Accra on Friday, August 3, 2018, the President noted that with the advent of social media, the risk of deliberate misinformation championed by “some elements in the democratic space” was a major threat to the country’s fledgling democracy.

“This deliberate misinformation campaign, which is not new in politics and war, have now gained added currency with the proliferation of media channels, which has become a vociferous tool for political actors who aim to win public relations battles by twisting facts and churning them out through traditional media as news.”

President Akufo-Addo, who expressed the concerns, particularly with the trend where even after the public had been misinformed and the true facts were later made known, mainstream media, in most cases, blatantly refused or failed to make an open and honest acknowledgment that they were wrong, saying, “the choice is often to sweep it under the carpet and move unto the next big story.”

This unfortunate situation, he said, was not something for regulators alone to deal with, but something that the whole world of media practitioners should resolutely confront and assist the society to identify and eliminate.