Looks at how soft control of the press supplants strong-arming in Ghana
Fair, Jo Ellen
JANUARY IS harmattan season in Accra, Ghana. Yellow dust billows off the Sahara, but this year from the east, the failed Kenyan elections blew their own hot storm. Ghana, fifty years independent...
...Such words are music to any reporter's ears...
...So are selective credentialing, selective access to government and business officials, scoops presented on a platter, and, of course, gifts—what Ghanaians call soli...
...The hypothetical question of "Could a Kenya happen here...
...By 2000, Rawlings had expended his constitutionally allotted time, and elections that year brought the opposition to power...
...The Accra Daily Mail's editor, Harruna Attah, says that he regularly fields telephone calls from government officials and business executives asking, "Where's the story I'm wanting to see...
...Abolition of newspaper licensing laws opened the way for private, commercial, competitive print journalism...
...She is a coeditor of The Art of Truth-Telling About Authoritarian Rule (2005...
...They will continue to do so until Ghanaian reporters are convinced that it is safe for them to press the powerful...
...So did his government...
...He smiles broadly...
...What is soft control...
...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...
...Minister, could you please describe the system used for allocating contracts...
...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...
...Attacks on human dignity...
...SOFT CONTROL of the Ghanaian press rests on more than cash payment...
...You must have covered the reconciliation hearings just right," I say...
...Newspapers, radio, and television in Africa boomed...
...The promised Freedom of Information Act never materialized...
...The overseas junket for just the right set of media owners, editors, and reporters often will do the trick nicely...
...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...
...In reporting, the small questions give traction...
...The Ghanaian media smile on every international display of the nation's leadership capacity, as if the rise of Kofi Annan had sealed the matter for all time, but as Kufuor headed to Kenya, the local press debated a question that seems inevitable in this breathless age: "Could a Kenya happen here...
...But as state officials and others in Africa learn to use new soft methods of press control, the small questions are becoming the hard ones for journalists to ask...
...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...
...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...
...Soft Control Seven years into the Kufuor era, many Ghanaian journalists laugh at the thought that this government once was considered a friend to the press...
...Education, training, and travel opportunities offered to working journalists are soft control...
...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...
...Jo ELLEN FAIR is a professor of journalism and director of the international studies major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison...
...Government admonishment of Ghanaian journalists is always wrapped in the flag...
...He asks, "Is this what we get with a globalized, commercialized, privatized media system...
...In Ghana, as in most of Africa, journalists find soft control efforts more vexing...
...What we await are conditions that will allow media organizations and reporters to stand up to it...
...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...
...As he would be the first to admit, his reporting on the hearings was factual but trite...
...In late 2006, the then Minister of Information provided free mobile phones to favored journalists, a valuable consideration in a profession that trades in communication, but his attempt to curry favor backfired when reporters who did not benefit from this generosity cried foul in the press...
...Sometimes government and business overstep the boundaries of good taste...
...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...
...State-owned media outlets were cut loose...
...prepared to raise big questions abstractly, but cautious, even diffident on details...
...Now he delightedly tells me that he has become a sports reporter...
...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...
...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...
...Kufuor told the press and the nation during his campaign, "Demand transparency from your government...
...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 DISSENT / Spring 2008 4 1 POLITICS ABROAD methods are a quiet cover for repressive impulses that may soon return...
...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 20032004...
...Rawlings was accustomed to the old ways of controlling reporters— heavy-handed intimidation, physical assault, and jail—but in a law-bound society these methods grew less and less effective...
...I'll be blocked from promotion...
...In fact, soli and all forms of soft control are normalcy...
...His station has given him the opportunity of a lifetime, reporting on the soccer tournaments, African Cup of Nations, hosted this year by POLITICS ABROAD Ghana...
...John Kufuor, the new president, owed a debt to the press...
...The question captures the gravitational pull of the grand imaginary in the African press, the lure of the lurid, the condition of reporters in most of Africa today: eager to be professional, relevant, and hard-hitting...
...So the small questions— Mr...
...Soft control is a sign that the African information economy has joined the world...
...Ghana's fractures and potential fractures are not as deep as Kenya's, and they are not primarily ethnic...
...Telenovelas imported from Mexico and Brazil and dubbed into Ghanaian English, as well as endless politically oriented public affairs shows, streamed into living rooms and storefronts where Ghanaians gathered for television...
...The answer, fascinatingly, may be the people...
...That is how mediasavvy government and business officials triumphantly and softly control the press...
...Tensions soon developed between government and the privatized media...
...This is why I would rather be covering sports...
...Criminal libel has been abolished, but the government still uses civil libel laws to discipline reporters when necessary...
...Ghana, fifty years independent and proud, confidently embraced democracy fifteen years ago...
...The difference for now is that Western reporters have room to negotiate soft control, while Ghanaian journalists still struggle to do so...
...Journalists understand that such words are both hortatory and cautionary...
...In Ghana, many observers of the press ar40 n DISSENT / Spring 2008 gue that soli is out of control...
...We don't have soldiers crowding our streets anymore here in Ghana, so the government is more refined in its manipulation of media houses," says Robert Clegg, an attorney who hosts a television public affairs show...
...In Ghana, media liberalization commenced in 1992 as President Jerry Rawlings, former flight lieutenant and coup maker, converted democrat, came to understand the new neoliberal realities...
...42 n DISSENT / Spring 2008 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...
...Soft control bludgeons no one, jails no one, directly threatens no one...
...Around here a journalist always has to be knowing how far he can go...
...More fundamentally, the government of Ghana, like governments throughout structurally reformed Africa, has learned to control the press in a brand-new way: softly...
...There is nothing particularly outrageous in the scale of goods and services now proffered to journalists by government and business...
...It works with, not across, the grain of the social realities of journalists: their low pay, engrained respect for seniority, desire for careers, love of country, and duty to family...
...Mayor, which roads are scheduled for repairs this year?—tend to be avoided...
...Many Ghanaian journalists are troubled by a development that Attah calls "a culture of hurling insults" and "sensationalized screaming...
...In June 2003 he lamented, "If my reportage seems to satisfy this government, what happens should another party rise to power...
...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...
...During his campaign, he had seduced Ghana's media with promises no self-respecting journalist could ignore: greater freedom of expression, repeal of criminal libel DISSENT / Spring 2008 • 39 POLITICS ABROAD laws, and even a Freedom of Information Act based on the American model...
...It is the panoply of blandishments, inducements, and small blockages that mediasavvy institutions employ to influence press coverage wherever market forces and a free press create an information hurly-burly...
...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...
...It could not...
...a sure sign that one of his reporters has gone entrepreneurial...
...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...
...He and others point to the particular advantages that foreign corporations (mainly South African) take to ensure "balanced reporting" on, say, the new factory or commercial development going up on the edge of town...
...Bloggers as well have little to fear when they write frankly about public affairs...
...Consequently, in the words of Kofi Nyantaki, general manager of TV3, "Ghana's press is like an old man...
...By the mid-1990s, dozens of poorly printed but scrappy' newspapers crowded each other at the kiosks...
...is most interesting not for its incisiveness, but for the way it grips the media professionals responsible for shaping Ghanaian political discourse...
...For eighteen months, this man fretted that reporting on details of the truth and reconciliation hearings would ruin his career...
...However, as Clegg knows, refined methods of manipulation can be quite effective...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Media owners use soft control to rein in their journalists (and they must rein them in because owners, too, are subject to the government's new light touch...
...We gum the government but never bite it...
...Democratization swept Africa in the early 1990s, bringing to most of the continent's fiftythree countries forward-looking constitutions, representative government, multiparty elections, and the legitimate rule of law...
...Soft control is exerted mainly by the state, but in contrast to the hard repression of the past, the state has no monopoly on it...
...Part of the normal package of democratization and of the structural adjustment that coincided with it was media liberalization...
...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...
...Newly empowered national and international business firms also employ the new methods to very good effect...
...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...
...Up and down the government-corporate media nexus, the careers of individual journalists can be made or broken with a phone call...
...Now President John Kufuor, who chairs the African Union Assembly, was called to Nairobi to shore up democracy there...
...It's not Ghanaian...
...It's over-thetop, outrageous these days," says E. GyimahBoadi, the executive director of the Ghana Center for Democratic Development...
...They are beginning to take full advantage of this freedom...
...New radio stations up and down the dial filled the airwaves with a mix of highlife, rap, country, and lots of talk...
...Deregulation and privatization of broadcast media did the same for radio and television...
...No doubt, under pseudonyms, journalists working in Ghana are also writing on these blogs...
...Although elections in new democracies—Ghana's will come in December—always risk cleaving the polity, a superheated Ghana would likelier melt than splinter...
Vol. 55 • April 2008 • No. 2
