THERE WILL BE INK - Initiative for Policy Dialogue

as supporting one political party or another. In Ghana, where the ruling party has suchdisproportionate influence (and where business contracts are made and broken by a company’sinfluence over those in power), even short interviews can apparently have serious consequences.Mingle said that media audiences read into comments far too much. Even though the Ghanaian Timesis state-owned (and therefore generally considered to be without party bias), Mingle said he still hastrouble tracking down comments, as the problem cuts across the media landscape. Journalists acrossthe board thought that developing trust between business and the media was crucial if business andeconomic journalism is to improve.Limitations imposed by journalist capacity and lack of expertiseMost journalists interviewed were forthright about their lack of business and economics expertise,even those who had participated in substantive training programs like the IIJ program in Berlin. Asnoted above, the journalism diploma programs on offer in Ghana do not provide any specializedtraining in business and economics reporting. While our researcher was unable to obtain curriculumsfor the university and diploma degrees in journalism, interviews suggest that these programs do notoffer any specific training in business and economic journalism. However, several of the journalistsinterviewed were either enrolled or planned to enroll in an economics or business university degreeprogram in Ghana in order to develop some expertise around these very important issues.Another problem arising from many journalists’ lack of expertise in business and economic issues,according to numerous journalists interviewed, is that companies seem to intentionally bombardjournalists with technical language and quantitative data that journalists find difficult to decipher,much less transform into something digestible to the Ghanaian public.One consequence of journalists’ lack of expertise in business reporting, which is also due to otherfactors, is the common practice of basically regurgitating company press releases for the front pageof the business section. Many journalists complained that much of business reporting in Ghanainvolves only the re-writing of private sector releases and announcements into news stories thatrarely go beyond anything skin-deep, much less investigate company claims or facts and figures.This, of course, is not a problem unique to Ghanaian journalism.Lack of resources available to journalistsThe general lack of resources available to journalists in Ghana is a major challenge for journalistscovering business and the economy, according to every journalist interviewed, even those at therelatively well-funded state media publications like the Daily Graphic. Journalists complained that theyhad little or no access to basic resources such as reimbursement for travel expenses, even to getaround within Accra, which given the cost of owning a car or taking taxis can be very expensive.Travel outside of Accra for reporting purposes was almost always prohibitively expensive, and oneof the main reasons why private-sector “travel sponsorship” and organization of junkets is soproblematic. If the media organizations themselves can’t pay for journalists to travel to the miningareas independently, they are almost always happy to send journalists on trips organized by thecompanies themselves. These company-sponsored trips (often luxurious for poorly paid journalists)inevitably color the reporting done on the relevant industries.Journalists said that access to equipment was also a problem. While most newsrooms our researchervisited seemed to have working computers, Internet access was not at all common. Access to apersonal laptop (taken for granted by journalists in the developed world) was very uncommon. The– 47 –