The tragedy of Ghana – Today’s press

When I was growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I was fortunate enough to, witness the days of the two juniors (Kwasi Pratt and Kwaku Baako), the Ben Ephsons, Kabrah Blay Amiheres, and many more notable media personalities in those days.

I used to stop at the newspaper stand at Nkrumah Circle near, then, P & T on

Read full articlemy way to school at Kaneshie and read the news at the stand, as I had no money to purchase one.

I did this for the whole of my secondary school days.

I witnessed quality journalism, young journalists who read and researched, in spite of the limited resources at their disposal in those days. Those were the days without the internet, no mobile phones, very rare if any, yet these young media men were on top of their jobs at the time of extreme difficulty and dangerous military regimes characterised by coups and counter-coups, yet they delivered with honesty and integrity and passion.

Today, the media landscape in Ghana is inundated, saturated, sucked, and, completely overwhelmed by unbaked, half-baked, unlettered, irresponsible, hunger-stricken, individuals, who neither have the talent nor the ability to be journalists.

These contemporary ‘journalists’ are wreaking havoc, undoing all the great works their predecessors did. The sad part is that today’s journalists have all the modern technology at their disposal coupled with democratic governance, yet they could barely exploit the opportunities to improve upon their works.

Whenever I listen to them, I feel sick, I feel like throwing up. They are deficient in all aspects of journalism. They do not read, research, analyse and hardly apply common sense. At best, they shout, scream and lie. They barely make sense, and the question I asked is ‘how did we get here?’