Establish policies to guide your operations. Prof. Karikari advises media owners
The former executive director for Media Foundation for West Africa, Professor Kwame Karikari, has advised media owners, particularly of radio stations, to establish policies internally to guide their day-to-day operations.
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He said it was time that media houses self-regulated their activities so as not to give the court a reason to sanction them whenever they went wrong.
Prof. Karikari added that if the media continued to be unprofessional and behaved in an irresponsible manner, it would leave the court with no option but to regulate them.
At a forum organised by the Media Foundation for West Africa for political party communicators in the Ashanti Region, Prof. Karikari noted that the primary objective of the foundation was to promote media freedom and not give room to regulatory bodies to descend on the media.
Advice
He, therefore, advised presenters and panellists who speak on radio to act professionally and abide by the code of ethics of the profession.
Prof. Karikari, who is also the Dean of the Department of Communications of Wisconsin University College, advised politicians not to use the air-time offered them by radio stations to engage in insults and name calling.
He urged them to use the airtime as an opportunity for them to sell their parties to the electorate so they should fruitfully market their political parties and tell the electorate what they were capable of achieving if given the mandate to rule.
Monitoring
The Executive Director for MFWA, Mr Suleiman Braimah, said the foundation had decided to embark on a project to monitor the use of abusive language and hate speech by politicians this year.
The purpose, he said, was to name and shame those media houses and party functionaries who engaged in such activities.
He said even though the foundation was based in Accra, it had become necessary for them to move round the country and explain the processes involved in the exercise and how data was gathered.
The forum, he indicated, expected to get feedback from party communicators on ways by which they could improve on their work.
He added that the team would be moving to other regions to interact with other party communicators and seek their views on the project as well.