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Chairman of the National Media Commission (NMC), Yaw Boadu Ayeboafo, has said that the rights of journalists are not above the rights of other citizens.
According to him, journalists should be ready to compensate for the harm they cause to others in the discharge of their duties since their rights are not superior to others.
“Anyone of us can say anything we want to say and nobody should prevent us from doing that. But after we have said what want to say, if it offends the sensitivity and sensibility of other people we must pay compensation because our right is no more important than the rights of anybody,” he said at an event to mark the World Press Freedom day in Accra.
He however admitted that media peronnel should be given room to do their work without any interference.
On his part, President of the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA), Roland Affail Monney, stressed that the media is the oxygen for the country’s democracy.
“The media serves as the oxygen for democracy, so if our democracy is not in tatters, even though our ranking is a source of concerns, it means there is a glimmer of hope that if we do things right, if our law and order community would apply the law regardless of who the perpetrators are,” he told TV3 on the sidelines of the event.
Ghana recently performed poorly in the latest press freedom ranking by Reporters Without Borders.
Ghana’s ranking dropped 30 places to the 60th position out of 180 countries that were studied.
The massive drop, which is the lowest to be recorded by the country, means that Ghana has moved from ‘satisfactory’ to ‘problematic’ on the situational index.
According to Reporters Without Borders, the association responsible for compiling the rankings, Ghana scored 67,43 which is the third heaviest drop after ranking 66th in 2005 and 67th in 2002.
The Reporters Without Borders pointed out government’s intolerance and interference as reasons for the heavy self-censorship in the work of journalists.
