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Recently, the Ghanaian Journalists Association held its annual awards banquet for Ghanaian newspaper, television, and radio reporters. Over the course of an evening in Accra, the awards committee handed out prizes for sports broadcasting, art criticism and the like. But when it came to the big prize of the evening, Journalist of the Year, the committee named no one.

Elaborating on the reasons behind this decision, the Association’s president explained that his choice was a statement about fallen (and falling) journalistic standards at all of the nation’s main news outlets. As the GJA’s president issued his wake-upcall to the country’s press corps, his audience scrambled for pads and pens, and cameras began to flash. The awards banquet had become an impromtu press conference, featuring the press embodied speaking on the subject of the press’s failures.

Over the next few days, most newspapers published editorials in support of the GJA’s decision, citing frequent spelling errors and celeb gossip encroaching on news columns as evidence that the standards of Ghanaian journalism are, in fact, on the decline.

I talk to my friend David, a nonprofit worker and local grad student, about this and he tells me that in his opinion, the Ghanaian media’s shortcomings are more than cosmetic. Ghana ranks fairly high among nations for its press freedom index, and has a pretty strong tradition of quality reporting and detailed, critical journalism, particularly dating back to the immediate post-independence era. But nowadays, David and I agreed, Ghanaian media seems to suffer from a derth of reporting, a lack of fact and factual analysis, and a high amount of he-said-she-said-we-said stories that stop just short of informing the public about what, exactly, is going on.

For the most part, it’s hard to tell one newspaper from another because they print mostly the same articles, sometimes with a modified headline or a deleted paragraph. The “foreign news” sections are reprints of BBC articles or AP articles, again with slight modifications. And headlines will read something along the lines of, “Education Minister Calls for Improvement in Primary Schools,” or, “NDC Promises Clean Water for Everyone.” And the article will tell you about the press conference where the education minister spoke, or about the background of the official who is spearheading the clean water initiative, but not what the improvements to primary schools might entail, or how many people in Ghana currently lack fresh water and for what reasons. So on one hand you have the recycling system in which all news is basically the same news, and on the other hand a lot of this “news” isn’t really news at all. These problems are by no means unique to Ghana, but they seem particularly acute here.

This derth of “real” or “effective” news media presents a real problem for citizens, particularly during this election year. The Ghanaians I’ve gotten to know are proud of their democratic tradition, and motivated about this election, and excited to talk about the prospects of a new government and a wide-open future, as the country modernizes, and globalizes, and all the other –izes applicable here. From local college students to my taxi drivers, I haven’t found anyone to be politically apathetic. General feelings about the election and about Ghana’s future run high and strong, but getting down to the policy nitty-gritty, the politics of actual decision-making and community interest, is difficult when “information” doesn’t present reality.

Walking around in Cape Coast, interviewing residents on their thoughts about the presidential election, this becomes more apparent. Out of about 30 people I talked to, maybe 5 or 6 spoke about issues – education, control of the country’s oil reserves, farm subsidies. The NPP, the current ruling party, has a signature dance move, a kind of peddling of the hands that accompanies the motto “we are moving forward,” so a lot of people do that. Eight or so people mention the presidential candidates by name, and the rest explain that they are “life-long” supporters of the NPP, or the opposing NDC, or the classic socialist CPP. Party branding seems to overwhelm personal image as far as the candidates are concerned. Loyalty is also paramount; once you chose a party, it is in poor taste to decamp. When I ask, why are you a life-long supporter of party x, what things do they support that you also support, answers go something like “they are good for Ghana,” or “they want to help the economy grow,” or “we’re making progress here.” One teenage girl says she will vote NDC because their candidate, John Atta Mills, is her uncle. I can’t argue with that.

Granted, I, as the reporter, would be hard-pressed to answer these questions also. Into my third week here, I’m still not sure exactly where the two major parties stand on the issues, or even ideologically; I have to sit down my friend David and have him explain it to me. It turns out I’m an NDC supporter, although I can’t articulate exactly why. Politics has more life here than it does at home, it seems fresher, more pertinent, youthful even, which I guess makes sense, given that Ghana is a relatively young democracy. The upcoming elections and the hype surrounding them make it a great time to be working in media here, particularly in radio, which is everyone’s preferred from of news, particularly outside of Accra.

Eagle fm, where I work, is a community station, one of three in greater Cape Coast. Eagle is jointly (under)funded by Cape Coast Polytechnic University and the occasional public fundraising initiative. The station members and presenters are a collection of university students, small-time local celebrities, and media personalities who shuttle between Eagle and a loosely-affiliated local television station, Coastal TV. During my first day here I am ordained Presenter Empress Abina Chantal, or Empress Chantal the Presenter Who Was Born on Tuesday, and after a few weeks of news presentation people begin to recognize me around town, which brings me to my favorite thing about Eagle fm: people actually listen to it.

I’ve spent two years working for Brown Student Radio as a music dj, features producer, publicity director, and designer of schedule posters and logo apparel. A running joke within BSR is that very few people listen to BSR, that our listenership is mainly composed of close friends on whose web browsers we have sneakily bookmarked BSR’s station archives page. Simply put, we are alienated from our airspace. Being young, hip, MCM-crazed, striving for originality, and university-funded, we lean towards the new, the conceptual, and the esoteric, from “experimental noise” pieces to lengthy academic interviews on theories of migration, the likes of which I produced my freshman year. We do so at the expense of finding an audience within our local airspace, crowded as it is with commercial signals from Boston playing the music and news-in-briefs that your typical audience prefers. And while there’s some kind of integrity to producing for production sake, this doesn’t change the fact that when we speak into BSR’s consul, we’re speaking into a vacuum. If we thought about this a little more, we might not speak at all.

To not speak into the consul of Eagle fm would cause a town-wide panic. In Cape Coast, Eagle fm really is “Kind of the Airwaves,” as its motto suggests. Ghanaians listen to radio morning, noon and night. Eagle fm plays in my taxi on the way to work, on my neighbor’s porch at a volume level inversely related to the time of day, from every shop and stall and bar and stoop in Cape Coast. It’s possible to walk the entire length of our main street without moving out of hearing range of the same radio broadcast.

Moreover, Eagle fm has a relationship with its listenership that BSR should strive to replicate. Our phone is constantly clogged with call-ins, ranging from shout-outs to commentary on our presentations to suggestions for programming. I’ve become a regular panelist on our weekly love advice show, which has a dedicated following of Cape Coasters who call in each week to give us their two cents on long distance relationships and whether you should date your friends. Eagle recently sponsored a health walk to promote healthy exercise habits among the youth of Cape Coast. We publicized it solely by radio, and the crowd that showed up at 6am on Saturday with water bottles and noisemakers and portable boom boxes (to broadcast Eagle along our way, of course) was huge. I could barely walk from early-morning fatigue, but the crowd’s energy was infectious. Ghana is a community-oriented society, and Eagle is a community-oriented radio station, and anything important to us seems to become important to our listeners, and to their families, and to their friends, faster than you can say 88.1 fm.

This extends to our more serious programming as well. Every morning we syndicate Peace fm’s daily news show, a compilation of national news, interviews with political figures, and discussions on the upcoming elections and on issues facing Ghana today. We, in Cape Coast, don’t have the resources or the physical proximity to produce such a show daily, but my idea is to begin production of this sort on a more local scale, on a more weekly basis. We can leave the heady political analysis to our conterparts in Accra, and focus on issues that affect the residents of Cape Coast strongly and uniquely.

For example, as a coastal town, Cape Coast’s economy is largely based on fishing. On the other hand, being more urban than most areas in Ghana, we import most of our other foods from elsewhere. Large, foreign food corporations flood Ghanaian markets with cheap, packaged foods, making it more difficult for local growers to make a living in food production. For example, he proliferation of Nestle powdered milk has made owning a cow in central Ghana simply uneconomical, so there’s no fresh milk to be found. For these reasons, the price of food is particularly important to residents of Cape Coast, and it has been rising steeply as of late. I decide to interview market vendors and fishermen about these drastic rises, and how they effect business and family life. After I talk to them, I tell them when they should tune in to hear their opinions on air. A few days later they track me down to say that they liked the broadcast, but they have something they’d like to add, can I record them again? It doesn’t occur to people very often, in Ghana or elsewhere, that they can be news, that they can be the authority on their livelihood. But once it does, they feel a responsibility towards the story, and towards the public that hears it. And they are both the public and the story. This is kind of cool.

More than listen, they absorb, and remember, and trust their local news outlet, which makes me feel as though I have unwittingly walked into a position of great power as the daily producer of the English Language News. The Daily English Language News at 3 pm is when we (myself, and two other news producers) find and print out four news articles about Ghana and four about greater Africa, using sources such as ghanaweb.com (a kind of Ghanaian Huffington Post) and the BBC. We then edit these articles (ghanaweb is hit or miss – a lot of the articles have big grammatical errors, or they’re just really poorly written), cut them down to 15-20 lines each, and present them as the News, complete with a Today’s Headlines briefing at the start and end of each segment. If we have some local news to present (public service announcements, or a feature like my piece on food prices), we can air that also.
The more I think about our daily news, the more the whole process strikes me as completely bizarre. Firstly, because it feeds into and off of the news recycling process I described earlier, and second because it puts me (non-Ghanaian) and a few rotating/random others in complete control of what quite a few people consider to be the important events of the day. There is television news in Cape Coast, but very few people own a TV. Ghana’s big dailies (called “graphics”) reach Cape Coast, but their circulation isn’t that big, because of high illiteracy, and because newspapers cost money, and you have to go out and buy them. Radio is free, it’s equally available to people of all incomes and education levels, its ready to consume at the turn of a dial and it is often consumed unwillingly or by accident, because as I said it’s hard to find a place in Cape Coast where you can’t hear a radio. So people rely almost solely on radio for news, and even if they’re not looking for news, news usually finds them.

So on one hand, radio, particularly community radio, is this great platform for spreading information, raising awareness, promoting conscious citizenship, and all of these media-as-development ideals. On the other hand, radio has an almost creepy monopoly on the news people consume, and what’s more, this monopoly isn’t being used to great effect. Eagle does a better job than most, I think, of keeping programming relevant, local, and mostly fresh. But overall, there’s no real regulating body, and no real public drive to hold radio stations to ethical and quality standards of journalism. Inevitably, some stations abuse this environment with really irresponsible reporting. For example, a station in a town in North Ghana recently reported that their local headman was working to rig the upcoming parliamentary election. Whether or not this was actually true, it was not substantiated in the broadcast, and the message was still strong enough to cause a huge public disturbance in which several people were injured.

Eagle, on the other hand, is particularly wary of what we call “incitement,” partly for fear that we’ll lose our university funding, but mostly because we care more about standards for standards’ sake. It is, after all, the run-up to country-wide elections, and most of the people who work here support the opposition, the NDC, and their presidential candidate, John Atta Mills. Hand in hand with support of the opposition comes support of a smooth transition, and an election free from manipulation by those currently in power. Ghanaians and foreigners agree that this election is a chance to “show the world” how functional Ghanaian democracy is, how much citizens respect the rule of law, and how much politicians respect the will of the citizens. So Eagle station members take any possibility of “incitement” very seriously.

Literally my first day at Eagle, I was asked to participate in an on-air discussion on “the role of journalists in making for a fair and safe election.” The host introduced me as a new presenter from America, and then asked, “So Abina Chantal, how does your media work with the elections?” This was about a month before our own elections, which I’d been following via the internet, but more with passing or perfunctory interest, because I wouldn’t be able to vote, because it was clear Obama was winning, because I was tired of election hype even before I left the country, honestly since the primary debates. And I thought, truthfully “my” media in aggregate does its best to “incite,” maybe not violence, but at least sentiments of urgency, outrage, loyalty, suspicion, fear, and betrayal. Obama favors white-hating religion, and McCain wants to bomb Iran, and scrutiny is the new analysis. In terms of sheer volume more than anything else you could say we have the Ghanaian media beat. No single-signal airspace to be found, which is actually a shame for BSR. You could say we suffer an excess of news, or maybe an inflamed ratio of reporting to news. Or that we have choices, hundreds of different and “alternative” news outlets to choose from, but that we don’t make them, at least not that often. And that we, myself included, drift towards news sources that validate our views rather than challenge them, because for better or worse no one really considers objectivity a value anymore.

When someone asks you a question on live radio, you have to speak whether or not you have anything to say. But you don’t really have to answer the question. So I said that it was media’s job to inform the citizens accurately and prepare them make a choice on election day. I know this sounds like rhetorical drivel, but I firmly believe this, and so does the staff of Eagle fm. Let’s hope next year’s Ghanaian Journalists Association banquet has something to be proud of.