Kasoa murder: The media did a good job – GJA Vice President

Amidst criticism that the media performed below the belt with the reportage of the 10-year-old boy who was murdered by his two friends at Kasoa, the Ghana Journalist Association (GJA) has jumped to their defence.

According to the Vice President of Ghana Journalists Association, Linda Asante Agyei the media covered every angle to the story to the extent of bringing to bear some social issues that people have turned blind eyes to.

Speaking on Metro TV’s Inside Pages programme on Saturday, April 10, 2021, she opined that “this is something that the media has given a wider coverage and we will commend the media for what they’ve done because they’ve unearthed certain things that were not being talked about or certain things, we have talked about over the years but were not getting results and I think this is the time for us to see concrete results out of that so I think so far so good for our media.”

She furthered that though it was unethical for the media to broadcast the faces and names of the minors involved in this tragic incident, the media was able to rectify their mistake and blur the faces of these young ones in subsequent news bulletins.

“It is unethical though in journalism to show faces and even names of minors in such incidences but then, in the heat of events, sometimes we forget ourselves that that is what we want to to. This is a hot story that everyone will want to get it out there…sometimes we forget that these are minor things that we should do ethically…the first day their faces were shown, we all saw it on television…but later on, I have seen on TV where their faces have been blurred…so we realized that ethically what we did earlier was wrong and we rectified it,” she added.

The two suspects are still in police custody as investigations proceed.

The deceased, Ishmael Abdallah Mensah was laid to rest on Friday, April 9, 2020.

Meanwhile, Ghanaians have called for the regulation of contents in the media space as it is perceived that the minors carried out this action following an advert, they saw on TV concerning money doubling.