Member of Parliament (MP) of the Buem Constituency, Kofi Iddie Adams, says in as much as media owners are responsible for the results of a polarized media space, regulators are also partly to blame.
According to him, the conversation on polarized media should not be about ownership but about the role of the National Media Commission (NMC) in creating the platform for media practitioners to be fair in the execution of their mandate.
“I don’t think the NMC has performed the way they are supposed to and that is where for me I would ask more attention is focused on. They wait to be called upon before they react and sometimes when they are called upon, the way and manner in which they go about their actions is not satisfying,” he stated.
He disclosed the various media platforms “are either at the center of the left or far left or center of the right or far right. Many of these media platforms have their founders being political active so in some ways they tend to influence the editorial policy of the media platform. They have a certain agenda to either run down the opponent and that actually causes the polarization.”
The MP sees no wrong in political actors owning media platforms if the platform is used to promote their ideology “but when they move further to attacking the opponent and running them down then that’s when polarization occurs,” he submitted in an interview with Samuel Eshun on the e.TV Ghana Fact Sheet show.
Kofi Adams was quick to add that religious programming is even deadlier than political ones. “We shouldn’t restrict ourselves to only political programming because the religious ones are also dangerous and if we don’t regulate them they can become a whole lot of problems for the nation.”
He however believes it would have been worse if the media was not polarized. “For the presence of all these platforms, people get to air their views and concerns, and we all have the opportunity of rebuttal
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