‘Joy Fm’ In Another Anti-Mills Hoax

“The leopard”, it is said, “can never change its spots”.

What is more, character is like a cough; no matter how one hides it, it will inadvertently be exposed.

These African proverbs are the lot of Joy FM, an Accra- based private radio station, which has succeeded over the years in hoodwinking many Ghanaians into believing that it is objective in its reportage. Unfortunately for this media house, every now and then, it is either exposed for its anti-NDC and anti-Mills bias or it exposes itself!

The latest exposure of the Accra-based radio station's bias reportage against the NDC (in favour of the NPP) occurred a couple of days ago in the heat of the riot by Muslim youths in Hohoe over the exhumation of the corpse of an Imam which had been buried.

The picture that accompanied the radio station's website reportage on this news item is a picture of some NPP supporters spread on the street of Accra opposite a law court where Kennedy Agyepong had been taken to after the elapse of forty-eight hours in police custody where he had been held for making genocidal statements.

Why Joy FM will want to use pictures of NPP supporters on a street in Accra vandalizing state and private properties to deceive Ghanaians that it is in fact pictures of chaotic scenes at Hohoe when the Muslim youths went on rampage is everybody's guess.

This is the umpteenth time Joy FM has through its website, myjoyonline, published falsehood with the obvious aim of stirring public sentiments against the NDC, President Mills and his government. Meanwhile, state-owned newspaper, the Daily Graphic, also continues to expose its anti-NDC and anti-Mills agenda by behaving like Joy FM and its website, myjoyonline. Obviously anxious to have the Mills government crucified, it found the false picture myjoyonline published to tarnish the government's image news worthy and thus used it to support the main story on its front page yesterday.

The picture came under the banner headline, MAYHEM IN HOHOE. The caption of the picture read “An aerial view of the chaotic scenes in Hohoe as a result of the riots.” The Daily Graphic then proudly credits the picture to myjoyonline.com, Joy FM's website.

Many Ghanaians, since 2010 when the Daily Graphic published a false story about 8,000 homosexuals in the Central and Western Regions have been keeping an eye on the paper's reportage.

Discerning ones have as a result not failed to see through front-page news items of the paper. Negative news about the NDC quickly makes the front pages of the newspaper while the positive ones hardly do. The NPP, on the other hand, gets its positive news on the front page of the paper while the negative ones are not published at all.

NDC supporters have blamed the party for the NPP's strangle-hold on the media in Ghana, opining that the ruling party, apart from failing to support private media sympathetic to its cause has left the state-owned media, including the National Media Commission (NMC), in the clutches of NPP activists.