What The Papers Say
Free Press, Ghana
Freedom to do what?
Two media personalities, Fifi Hesse, Director General of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation and George Bennet, head of the African Service of the BBC more or less initiated the debate.
Mr Hesse whilst inaugurating five committees of the Ghana Journalists Association is reported as saying there was nothing like absolute freedom, adding journalists should ask themselves: Freedom to do what? - when they talked about press freedom.
Commenting on the British Government's intervention in the broadcast of an interview with an IRA official on the BBC, Mr Bennet too said that every government has the power to control the flow of information to its public if it finds it necessary.
This is not the first time these views have been voiced but their import lies in what they mean to various people. Laws like libel and sedition as well as national security constitute a check to what journalists can do.
As a service profession too whose raison d'etre is the public interest, journalists too are by their training and practice expected to exercise good judgement in what they write.
It is also a fact of life that nothing operates in absolute terms. There is certainly no absolute freedom whether for the press, judiciary or other institutions, but every society seeks to strike a meaningful degree of freedom that will permit institutions to give of their best, hence the issue is discussed at all.
If we are a little concerned, it is because there is always abundant joy, such amazing joy, in the hearts of governments and some people in our part of the world, whenever a statement is made, especially if the source is Western, which tends to justify and legitimize the capricious manipulation of the media.
In other parts of the world such statements are regarded as serious assaults on the freedom of the press.
Where we should see a sign of foreboding tragedy in the air is where and when you find practising journalists themselves trying to endorse attempts to muzzle the press, what in our situation has been termed the puppetry role of the press.
The heart of the matter is that it is not even individual journalists who need press freedom.
Society itself needs a free press to be a proper watchdog on the activities of government, and all other members of society.
Thus it is society itself which should moan and groan, if the press becomes a puppet without any will of its own, but the will of hidden forces.
As we said earlier there can be no argument that all forms of control exist for both the private and state-owned press, but control should not be interpreted to mean manipulation which is the case in many African states.
The recent BBC incident has been cited as evidence of control even in Britain but what is of interest, and a further reflection of the atmosphere of press freedom is that fact that British society debated openly whether government intervention was right or wrong.
Of significance and interest too is the fact that workers of the BBC with the support of the National Union of Journalists were able to demand and insist on a reversal of the government's initial move, a phenomenon that cannot be found in many third world countries.
Terms like national interest, national security, public interest are all terms, glorified ones, which should naturally induce commitment to the goals and plans of governments when they invoke them to justify their control of the press but then we are talking about Africa.
For seven years Acheampong's SMC too "controlled the press" especially during his ill-fated Union Government campaign, a control that only hid from the world a reign of corruption and masked his unpopularity. Bokassa was at the top of his voice screaming national interest when he shot down hundreds of school children and banned the local press from reporting on the massacre.
Under the canopy of the all-time glorified term of national interest, Big Dada Amin "controlled" the Ugandan press to cover up his trial of corruption, mis- management and murder.
The master propagandist, Goebbels was probably the first in this century to hold onto the banner of national interest, this time Aryan supremacy, when he "controlled" the press to cover the atrocities of the Nazis against mankind.
Given the corrupting nature of power, every society needs some institutions with a reasonable degree of independence and freedom to check unbridled displays of power by politicians.
The American press too is controlled by the same forces of society we might cite, but it took this "controlled press" to bring down a powerful president like Richard Nixon.
Let them openly stand out and be counted by history, those who say a free press is an abomination.
The Ghanaian journalist is certainly not asking for the absolute when he asks for press freedom. Neither is he chasing shadows or indulging in fantasy.
The question of course is why does he ask for press freedom and then you may add the other question freedom to do what?, a question we are going to answer, not from any dogma or theory, but from actual practice.
