Features
Press freedom & the bearded goat
- /home/u249204778/domains/spectator.com.gh/public_html/wp-content/plugins/mvp-social-buttons/mvp-social-buttons.php on line 27
https://spectator.com.gh/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/journalists-covering-assignment.jpeg&description=Press freedom & the bearded goat', 'pinterestShare', 'width=750,height=350'); return false;" title="Pin This Post">
- Share
- Tweet /home/u249204778/domains/spectator.com.gh/public_html/wp-content/plugins/mvp-social-buttons/mvp-social-buttons.php on line 72
https://spectator.com.gh/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/journalists-covering-assignment.jpeg&description=Press freedom & the bearded goat', 'pinterestShare', 'width=750,height=350'); return false;" title="Pin This Post">
THE journalist is a hunter. He goes after human rats and grasscutters personified, matters about whom he can salt and spice and present as news. The fatter and juicier the catch, the better, because sensation is essentially our cup of tea.
Our job is to sell news and sell it in grand style.
Because the journalist is a hunter and is created with a special kind of nose for sniffing out news, he is usually not welcome in many places. He is seen as someone who has been born to make people uncomfortable.
The problem is that some people don’t want things written about them even if it is promotional and favourable. When it entails publishing their pictures alongside the story, they are doubly scared.
“Please, don’t use my picture. People will think I’ve got money and come for loan,” someone told me.
Anyhow, journalists are seen as intruders, undesirables, born with plenty of okro in the mouth; maybe some also in the nose. Some of my friends are no longer too close because they fear I’d give them full coverage in the Sikaman Palava column. Ha ha ha! What a funny world!
Well, people like my Uncle, Sir Kofi Jogolo, my former classmate and born-mathematician, Kwame Korkorti, and ex-football star cum human-salamander Kofi Kokotako don’t mind featuring in the hilarious inches of this column. Kofi Owuo alias Death By Poverty is one personality who has to be mentioned in this palaver.
These are people who are going to live long, primarily because they see the world as one big ball of fun. When Kwame Korkorti was told that his dear mother was dead at home, he smiled and asked the bearer of the message whether his mother had cooked the afternoon meal before claiming she was dead. Until her death, Korkorti ate his lunch at his mother’s end.
When my Uncle Kofi Jogolo was picked and lost 1,500 dollars and a good amount of Sikaman currency, he didn’t lament the loss. Instead he was amused. In fact, he was almost glad about it, because he grinned from ear to ear, stroked his delicate moustache and congratulated the thief, adding that “He is smarter than I am.” Yeah, Jogolo is the man who employs a Swedish barber to trim his moustache.
And when Kofi Kokotako was unemployed and was nearly hit by an articulated truck, he called the driver a fool. “The idiot should have killed me,” he said to me. “Didn’t he know I was unemployed and suffering?”
Today, Kokotako is employed as a Reverend and is not doing badly at all. Thanks to the regular silver collection.
And what about Kofi Owuo, the celebrated poor man. His wife left him not because he was poor, but because he swore in front of her that he would never prosper.
The following dawn the wife packed bag and baggage and went back to her parents and told them all about her husband’s alliance with poverty. Her parents were bewildered and called the alliance unholy. They had no option than to send back Owuo’s drinks to end the marriage.
Kofi Owuo alias Death By Poverty did not contest the issue. He was more engrossed thinking about how to become poorer than to contest what he called a frivolous matter. The wife could go to hell, he said. These are people longevity smiles upon. Nothing worries them.
Getting back to talking about journalists. I’d say that anywhere there is journalism, the issue of press freedom is not too far away. Is the press free? That’s one question foreigners want answer to when they are on visit.
Well, journalists celebrate a yearly WORLD PRESS FREEDOM DAY to drum home the idea of press freedom as a very important thing in the practice of journalism.
This year’s was celebrated almost a fortnight ago but people didn’t see much of us because we are normally not good celebrants. We should have mounted a float to roam the entire capital, dancing asaboni to brass band music just like PTC did recently.
Although journalists are known to be very good dancers because they walk very much, on that day, they were all busy writing. It was the Minister of Information, Mr Kofi Totobi Quakyi who saved the day by addressing a forum organised to mark the day.
He is a man I’ve always admired since his radical university days. He spoke much on press freedom, cautioning the press not to abuse the freedom granted by the Fourth Republican constitution, but to use it for the progress of society.
Well, press freedom has been defined by many journalists as the freedom to ‘write nonsense’. This definition is not quite accurate. I asked one staff reporter to define press freedom. It took him fifteen minutes to put up something.
“Press freedom is the freedom that is enjoyed by the press that enables journalists to publish or broadcast any kind of material so long as it is absolutely true, is not libelous and slanderous, and is not against the national interest.”
I gave him eight out of 10, a straight A. I guess every journalist is old enough to know that certain things he or she writes is for or against the national interest. We certainly must guard against writing against the national interest; that is very important.
There is also the question of criticising government. The government can be criticized, so long as the criticisms are genuine and the President and his ministers are not insulted and called names. Let us criticize, but let us do it decently so that the journalistic profession can be revered, and its nobility acknowledged. We are not war mongers, are we?
One area in which journalists are not spoken well of is the complaint that they misquote people. Journalists sometimes misquote people, but in four out of five complaints it turns out that nobody is misquoted after all.
When we interview people they say things unreservedly and we publish unreservedly. When the publication is out and their friends or superiors read it and accuse them of having said too much to the press, then they start claiming they were misquoted.
We have encountered these ‘misquotation palaver’ every now and then and reporters are usually accused of this transgression. However, when they bring out their note-books or recorders, it is realised that they wrote nothing out of the way. “Book no lie”.
My advice to people who deal with the press is that if they do not want anything written, they shouldn’t say it. What they want to say is OFF-RECORD, then of course, there is no reason to say it. When you say it, you’re taking a risk. In that instance, you can’t also claim to have been misquoted or words put into your mouth.
And it isn’t every journalist who would be circumspect in matters that are supposed to be off-record, because journalists often want to be as sensational as possible to make their stories saleable. So say just what you want to see published and you won’t later regret it and claim you were misquoted.
Well, I’m not holding brief for journalists, because a few of us are notorious for colouring our reports sometimes sand-papering the words so much that they look very bright in front of readers.
As I once said, when the police tells one such notorious pressman that the thief stole a brown goat, the pressman would want to know whether the goat was bearded. Of course, the police would say ‘Yes’.
However, in the press report, it appears, “A gang of notorious goat-thieves were apprehended in the early hours of yesterday. In the car in which they were riding was a brownish-red goat having a long beard. Upon further examination, it was realised that the goat also had a greyish moustache.”
When the story appears, the police are naturally disturbed. A single thief turns out to be a gang of thieves. The goat also becomes a chameleon and changes colour to brownish-red. And a moustacheless goat overnight wears a greyish moustache whether you like it or not. Luckily the journalist does not add that the moustache was trimmed by a Swedish barber.
Yes, we have a few of such mischief-creating, chronically notorious journalists. But they are one in a hundred. In any case, we make the world. And we shall always do our best to make it a happy place to live in.
This article was first publish on Saturday, May, 20, 1995
We are raised on a foundational myth: that sacrifice is a currency, and time is a bank that honors it. From youth, we are fed the romantic notion that self-denial is an investment.
We are told that if we starve our own ambitions to feed the collective, if we endure silent strains, postpone our vitality, and mortgage our peace for the security of others or the demands of an unrelenting system, the ledger will eventually balance.
We are led to believe that old age is a benevolent auditor-a quiet season where the universe presents a receipt for our endurance and hands back comfort, reverence, and ease.
It does not.
Old age is not a rewards ceremony; it is a reckoning. And the bitterest truth of longevity is that aging does not care how much you gave up. It cares only how you are built to withstand the descent.
The myth of deferred living
To sacrifice is to treat the present as a disposable bridge to a destination that rarely resembles the brochure. In the architecture of a lifetime, the human body and mind operate under strict biological and emotional laws.
Every time you override your limits, swallow your voice, or defer your joy for a hypothetical tomorrow, you are not saving credit-you are accumulating debt in tissue, joint, and spirit.
When people reach advanced age, the societal narrative expects them to bask in a golden twilight of quiet dignity earned through decades of self-effacement. But look closer at the reality of unrewarded sacrifice.
The worn-out joints do not ache with the romantic resonance of a noble history; they ache simply because they were overspent on things that ultimately did not require or appreciate the cost.
The silence kept to keep the peace turns into an isolation that no one bothers to breach.
Time does not compound the value of a sacrificed life. It merely exposes the vacancy left behind.
The biological and psychological toll
From a systemic standpoint, chronic self-denial is a high-stress pathology. The nervous system remembers every time you ignored its signals in favor of duty.
Structural Breakdown: Chronic tension-whether physical or emotional-alters posture, compresses the spine, and locks the body into defensive, braced patterns that harden over decades.
The Emotional Ledger: Emotional suppression leaves a residue that compounds into bitterness or detachment. When the external roles that demanded your sacrifice (the relentless career, the draining obligation, the unreciprocated loyalty) finally fall away, what remains is not a triumphant hero, but a depleted vessel wondering where the trade-off went.
The universe has no sentimental attachment to your martyrdom. Biology does not check your resume to see how many weekends you surrendered. It responds strictly to mechanics, alignment, and nourishment. If you spent your life running on empty to fuel everyone else’s engine, your own chassis simply wears out sooner, leaving you stranded on the roadside of your own history.
Reclaiming sovereignty before the audit
If old age refuses to honor sacrifice, then the only intelligent response is to stop offering it. Sovereignty cannot be postponed until retirement; it must be practiced in the present tense.
Sovereign living requires a radical shift in how we value our energy:
Cease the silent ledger: Stop keeping a mental tally of what you endure for others, expecting a delayed payout. If a duty requires your self-destruction, it is a bad investment. Cut the losses now.
Honor the vessel first: No system, institution, or relationship is worth the structural integrity of your body and mind. Alignment and self-preservation are not selfish; they are the baseline requirements for a functional existence.
Redefine legacy: True legacy is not built on how much you endured, but on how fully you inhabited your own autonomy. People are remembered not for how quietly they suffered, but for the distinct, uncompromised shape of their truth.
The years will pass whether you spend them as a perpetual offering or as an autonomous agent. The calendar does not pity the martyr. Strip away the romanticism of endless endurance, reclaim your boundaries, and demand that your life pay dividends now-because the future owes nothing to those who spent it all on a receipt that nobody is going to cash.
By Robert Ekow Grimmond-Thompson
WITH the advent of multi-party democracy, press freedom was born again. And soon after, Ghanaian journalists started speaking in tongues. Small groups of people, infected with the idea of a free press, got together and sought finance to produce newspapers.
The newspaper craze was also contagious and overnight, the newsstands became laden with newspapers of various sizes, colours, shades, emotions and, of course, notoriety.
Readers of newspapers became confused. With purchasing power constraints to consider, they didn’t know which papers to buy. Moreover, it was difficult to know immediately which papers were worth reading and which were mere garbage.
Soon, the sheep were separated from the goats. Some papers which got no saleable news and survived on lies and speculations were eventually boycotted. When they couldn’t break even, they quietly left the stands. Others were hopelessly sub-standard in content, language and layout. For some time, they survived on artificial respiration but lapsed into coma. Others simply disappeared after paying damages for libel.
Today, the fittest have survived, notable among them the Ghanaian Chronicle, Independent, Free Press, Ghana Palaver, Democrat, Public Agenda, Statesman, P & P and Insight. They are slugging it out on the stands and only time will tell which of them would survive the beginning of the next millennium.
On the electronic front, radio stations have come operating Frequency Modulation (FM) units. Short Wave (SW) being too expensive to venture into, the result is JOY 99.7 FM, GOLD, ATLANTIC, CHOICE FM and other private regional, town and cottage FM stations that dot various parts of the country.
These have brought about variety and jobs. So have the television stations. Ghana Television (GTV) is facing competition from TV3 and Metro TV. Competition brings about in efficiency, and for once we can all see that GTV is performing better after being divested of the monopoly it enjoyed.
Journalists who man the newspapers, radio and television stations together form the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA), an association which, until recent years, existed only in name. It is now feverishly preparing to celebrate its Golden Jubilee, an occasion I believe will give more meaning to the Association and anchor it firmly for good as a closely-knit union of Ghanaian media practitioners.
PRINT MEDIA
Print journalism has really come a long way, plodding on like the proverbial snail, hoping to achieve the ultimate. It has had to contend with vicissitudes of fortunes as one political era succeeded another.
Of interest is also the fact that from the cut-and-paste method, press outfits now employ desktop publishing techniques with PageMaker components, making the job easy and speedy. From for four-page newspapers we can now boast of are 30 pages and more, radio stations are on air 24 hours a day.
The development of the media is one thing people have taken note of, and in years to come, the fourth estate of the realm will be well-equipped to collect and dispense information more efficiently, more accurately, and more speedily.
There is another side to it. The media is likely to develop into a monster, the way it has developed to harass Lady Diana, the Princess of Wales, to her death; the way it has made Bill Clinton very uncomfortable by making a showpiece of his private sex life, and hundreds of others.
Indeed, until her death, the Princess had no privacy. She couldn’t sneeze without it being reported somewhere in a newspaper, complete with pictures in colour. At one stage, she lamented being a celebrity and asked the press to leave her alone to lead her life without world attention. She died while speeding away from pressmen who were furiously chasing her (and her boyfriend) on motorcycles.
If the press develops in Sikaman to the extent that it can in future drive someone to his or her death, cause heart attacks, and destroy families and leaders, can be tolerated as it has been in the United States and Europe?
Some of us think that becoming copycats of alien values and foreign systems is causing more harm than good to our society. For instance, it would be very unfortunate if the Ghanaian media developed to the negative extent that it can publish pictures nude girls as some British tabloids do.
The African culture is a decent one and should not be tainted with the wholesale acceptance of everything western. In Europe there are magazines for homosexuals and lesbians, glorifying their acts and promoting their perverted ideals.
The homosexual culture is gradually seeping into African countries, Sikaman inclusive. Should we, therefore, expect to see a homosexual magazine on our newsstands one day?
If the European and American press can harass celebrities, presidents and top shots to the point of discomfort and even death, should the African press copy same if our culture is palpably different in form and orientation, history and tradition?
What I would like to see of a future Ghanaian media is a development-oriented press system seeking to promote the ideals of societal progress, economic growth, agricultural development, political unity, social cohesion and technological advancement.
And what I’d hate to see is the kind of media that is overly interested in wanting to know what the president eats for breakfast, which women he has spoken to of late, and when he is likely to sneeze without covering his nose with a handkerchief.
What I’d also hate to see is a media that seeks to play one tribe against the other, take to pornography or pry into the private lives of people not for any other purpose than to sell newspapers that only thrive on the obscene.
I’ve heard some editors say, “If you don’t write and insult Rawlings your paper won’t sell.” What kind of mentality is that?
The African press must develop, but it must do so in a positive way and not in the negative and destructive sense.
This article was first published on Saturday August 29, 1998
