Ghanaweb media cacophony and insipid write-ups

By Kwesi Atta Sakyi

I must apologise to my numerous fans on Ghanaweb for not being regular with my articles. Truth be told, I have a new taxing and demanding lecturing job which makes it hard to attend to my hobby of writing.

All the same, I think I have bounced back as six months down the line, I have settled well into my new job. My own observation with Ghanaweb is that we lack quality news content these days, as about 90% of the articles published are politically- motivated. We lack articles on development issues as well as on social issues.

Some articles are poorly written, with a lot of grammatical errors. Sometimes, some articles are full of damned lies, concoctions and insults, with facts twisted. Some contributors express their opinions on raging issues in highly sensational and emotional manner, with a lot of bias, instead of in a balanced manner.

We are seeing too much yellow and gutter journalism on Ghanaweb, what others call journalese. I think some of our journalists these days are not worth their salt as they reflect poor professional ethics. It seems as though some of our modern journalists in Ghana are not well trained and they lack depth of knowledge. The same can be said of many of our forumers and contributors, some of whom are abysmally miseducated and semi-literate.

Many of our current crop of journalists cannot measure up to others like Ajoa Yeboah Afari, Ayeboahfo, Anas Amereyaw Anas, Joe Aggrey, Gyewu Kyem, Henry Ofori, among others. This is a sure sign of our failed and parlous education system in Ghana. We lack investigative journalism.

It looks as if these days, we have more paparazzi journalists writing on Ghanaweb. News items which are presented on Ghanaweb lack factual content as they are full of opinions, speculations and insults.

We are now seeing a situation whereby the news items and articles presented on Ghanaweb are monotonous, hovering around particular names like Afari Djan, Woyome, Ayariga, Atuguba, Martin Amidu, Pink Sheets, Supreme Court, RLG, Agambila, among others.

Even news items which are presented by the media houses have horrible grammatical errors, and they lack creativity. Most of them come in terribly written English. What some of our journalists lack is the spirit of research and taking pains to do critical thinking and careful scrutiny of their write-ups.

Some do not spell-check or consider the grammatical errors in their sentence construction. There is a lot which is written on Ghanaweb which is tantamount to much ado about nothing, or what I term media cacophony or media hullabaloo or hubbub. That notwithstanding, there are still some quality articles which turn up on Ghanaweb, so we should not lose hope as it is a forum for interaction.

I have visited other online forums for Ghana, such as ghanaforum, ghanavillage, ghanaman, Ghana.com, among others, and I still return to Ghanaweb because of its great interactiveness. So keep going to the site. In the next few weeks, I shall be posting a lot of articles with some in Fante. I have started work on two novels which is work-in-progress, and I shall keep you posted. Chao!

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