GTV coverage of NRC put off because of costs

Accra, Oct 30, GNA- Ghana Television's (GTV) live coverage of the proceedings of the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC) was put off because of cost, Ms Annie Anipa the NRC Public Affairs Director said on Thursday.

Speaking at the monthly stakeholders' meeting on the coverage of the work of the Commission, Ms Anipa, acknowledged that the television coverage proved to be effective means of generating public interest in the Commission's work.

However, she said for sometime now, there had been a problem of availability of tapes, and added that Commission agreed to provide some tapes to GTV to be returned later to the Commission for record keeping, but GTV also maintained it needed the tapes for its own record purposes. Ms Anipa said the Commission had agreed now to film the proceedings and give the tapes to GTV, stating, "we would expect some reciprocity from GBC."

Mr Cyril Acolatse, an immediate past member of the National Media Commission emphasised the need for a national record keeping on the reconciliation process.

Mr Acolatse suggested a meeting of all stakeholders with the Minister of Information to reach a lasting solution on television coverage of the NRC proceedings for records.

The meeting also recognised the need to move away into modern digital methods of television recording.

Mr Ato Baiden, Monitoring Executive of Media Watch, presented the September report, the ninth since the Commission began public hearing in January.

The reports noted a general decline in the extent of the coverage of the work of the NRC across all media.

Also, it stated that coverage of the work of the NRC remained generally neutral.

It however observed that the media found it difficult to resist the temptation to interview witnesses before or after they had appeared before the NRC.

In all stories published by the Ghana News Agency (GNA), four television stations, 15 newspapers, 28 radio stations, were monitored and analysed, in terms prominence, space or airtime as well as tone of stories of national reconciliation.

All stories in both the electronic and print media were generally neutral in tone and in their portrayal of witnesses or actors appearing before the Commission.

The GNA published a total of 18 stories, in which testimonies of witnesses at the NRC sitting in Kumasi featured prominently. GTV continued to lead in terms of amount of airtime devoted top the process scoring 94.6 per cent, followed by Metro TV with 5.4 per cent. TV 3 did not publish any story, but the report was silent on coverage by TV Africa.

With radio, Unique FM devoted the largest amount of airtime scoring 20.6, followed by Joy FM with 7.7 per cent.

In the print media category, the Pioneer devoted the largest amount of space of 21.2 per cent of the total space devoted to stories published. The Daily Graphic came second with 17.7 per cent of the total coverage, but the Accra Daily Mail was in close contention to it.

The report urged the media to maintain the generally neutral tone of reporting the work of the NRC.

The report was published as part of a contractual agreement between the National Media Commission and Media Watch Limited, as part of a year's monitoring exercise of the NRC.

The exercise is receiving funding from the United Nations Development programme, through the National Governance Programme and supported by the Friedriech Ebert Stifung.