The past few weeks have witnessed an unprecedented call for media freedom to be upheld in Ghana. Buoyed by the drop in position of Ghana from first to fifth in Africa, everybody that matters in the media landscape with a voice seems to be making the headlines. And of course! media practitioners are at their best, enumerating various infractions against  media freedom. However, the saintly attitude assumed by some media practitioners has been so dazzling that christening them masters of hypocrisy would be charitable.

Media Freedom accompanied with responsibility

I believe in media freedom but I also believe that freedom must be exercised RESPONSIBLY. The media in Ghana somehow have a warped notion that sensationalism is all there is. Caution is often thrown to the wind in their quest to be the first to break the news. It matters not even if the news is later proven to be an absolute falsehood!
I always fail the test when I have to show indifference to an absolute hypocritical situation. I have been raised to always pay grateful respect with a deserving hypocritical response of the utmost sincerity when hypocrisy is displayed: – a stance that has not endeared me to a lot of people. In Ghana, it seems that hypocrisy must not only be worshipped but be dealt with absolute obsequiousness! As a medical practitioner doubling as a pseudo media practitioner, I have always wondered how come some media practitioners get away with so much falsehood and half-truths. Whereas I take great pain and effort to ensure that I keep up with latest medical knowledge and practice when answering questions in the health column of the Weekly Mirror, however some media practitioners just spew out anything! This recklessness informed my piece entitled “Don’t be neutral but please be fair”“Don’t be neutral but please be fair” which seem to have fallen on deaf ears despite being carried by most media outlets.

Character Assassination

Running with peoples account as the gospel truth without double checking has maligned people beyond measure and has caused pain to many people. As a medical student, I witnessed how a mob from Korle Gonno almost lynched medical staffs at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital’s Surgical and Medical Emergency because of misinformation. I have witnessed people battle emotional trauma from unbalanced reportage and in some cases absolute fabrication and of course! I don’t need to recount how the misuse of media fueled the Rwandan genocide.
Why should the media be circumspect even with seemingly juicy stories? Because it is not unusual for people to look you in the eyes and feed you with stories they have never seen. Was it not a Ghanaian that found a picture of babies nursed on plastic chairs in Kenya and circulated it as pictures coming from the Children’s Block of Korle Bu in Ghana? Let me give you two examples;

Unnecessary Media Frenziness

Early last year, there was social media frenzy on a child who was referred to Korle Bu Children’s Block in an ambulance who was said to have been left unattended to for hours. As usual health workers were bastardized with threat of body harm. When the father was questioned in the presence of myself, the nurse-in-charge and the PRO of Korle Bu, it turned out that the child was received, examined and triaged not to be an emergency and handed over to the OPD to be attended to and discharged. After unsuccessfully attempting to jump the queue using all sort of tricks including “having a flight to catch”, he artfully contrived that story and circulated it. I may never see anybody more sheepishly apologetic when confronted but his fabricated story had already gone viral with its attendant damage to the hospital.
Barely a week ago, there was another story of a child purported to have died from swallowing a coin. One Tetteh Tsatsu Kodzo run wild on social media and news portal alleging that; “The doctor who attended to the 3-year old girl was negligent with the medical procedure and wrongfully administered intravenous fluids instead of oxygen to the suffocating girl” She then zoomed onto how rude the nurses were when questioned. As it turned out, no such death occurred and nobody could ever beat her as far as fertile imagination is concerned. Again, emotions got the better side of Ghanaians with all sort of insults and threats hurled at health workers. Health workers had to deal with a paltry apology she rendered on Facebook when the PRO of Korle Bu challenged her story. Again, the harm was done and possibly indelibly written in the minds of people. I can go on and on but the point remains that natural justice dictates that every effort should be made to listen to both sides of the divide before publishing because people can be treacherous. It looks like media practitioners in Ghana remember nothing of this ethical requirement.
What is baffling is that sometimes it doesn’t take that much to cast doubt on a sensational story. For example, there was a reportage of a baby said to have died because the attending doctor took the baby off oxygen. Parents inability to pay was adduced as the reason. How can you be neutral in this situation? Wouldn’t your humanity be questioned if this does not stir up your emotions? However, beyond the sensationalism and emotional rousing lies a truth that few common targeted questions could unravel. Do people pay before oxygen is administered? What does the doctor gain by cutting off the oxygen? This was said to have happened in a government run facility and not a private one so this doctor is not going to be paid by the amount of money generated by the facility. Even if it is, the doctor must be extremely callous to do that to a child irrespective of how bad the parents’ posture might have been. But the sensationalism of the unbalanced story blinded them to do a little interrogation of the situation. As it turned out, the story was absolutely false and no so much of a whisper was heard from the radio station that carried the story.

Following closely in the heels of this story was the one that maligned one of the hard-working doctors I have ever seen, Dr Nana Brako – the stolen baby saga at Ridge hospital. Again, an extreme premature baby had died, parents were counselled and shown the body. Father decided to go to a radio station and was given the time to spew out falsehood without restraint. Father’s reason for theft of the baby? Because he was asked to wait while the team gathered to counsel them instead of letting him go to the bedside – a practice used to help reduce the shock on parents who have lost their children overnight. Also, the father thought that the colour of the baby shown him had changed with the demise of the baby. To add salt to injury, a panelist on the show, a psychologist as I understand went on to justify why an extreme premature baby weighing around one kilogram would be stolen. “You can buy an incubator and put the stolen baby in” – she blurted out. Why would anybody go to that length? Care for premature babies are so delicate and unpredictable that who would want to go through all that. Besides incubators are ridiculously expensive and yet do not guarantee the survival of the child so if somebody wants a baby that badly and wants to “buy” one, why not a full-term baby where all one needs is milk? And what would motivate a paediatrician of such impeccable repute to want to sell a baby? These did not make any sense but Ghanaians were fed with these stories and health workers were hated across the country. Committees were set to look into these cases at huge expense to the tax payers with the verdict being that nothing untoward had happened. The response from the media houses that made mileage on these stories? Palpable silence!

There won’t be enough space to recount false stories carried in the media in the health sector alone much less all the other sectors and that’s why I paraphrase Snowball’s summary of the seven commandments made popular by the bleating sheep in George Orwell’s Animal farm “ Media freedom good, responsible free media better”
astom2@yahoo.com
A member of Paediatric Society of Ghana