Gov't: No MDAs Should Entertain Multimedia Journalists...Treat Them As Gate-crashers

Government has issued a caveat to all its Ministries, Departments and Agencies that any journalist of the Multimedia Group Limited (MGL) should be treated as a �gate-crasher�. Deputy Information Minister, James Agyenim Boateng, who made this known in an interview on OkayFM 101.7 on Wednesday, said any MDAs who flout this directive will have themselves to blame. A gate crasher is a person who attends an event or social affair without being invited or without having proper credentials to get in. The Government of Ghana officially announced this week its decision to boycott all programs run by media houses operating on the license of the MGL. This position of government, according to James Agyenim Boateng, comes on the heels of what they consider to be �open and manifest bias� by MGL against the NDC and the Mills administration. Thus, per his remarks the �entire government machinery� has been instructed not to entertain them or receive them with open arms due to their lack of objectivity and neutrality and to regard them as �gate-crashers�. According to him, government will find other platforms to disseminate its programmes, adding that in the light of the boycott decision, any MGL journalist at a state function should be considered a �gate-crasher.� In an interview with Kwame Nkrumah Tikese, host of Okay FM�s Ade Akye Abia Morning Show, the deputy Information Minister stressed that government's decision was well-thought out and did not come out of the blue. He was emphatic that government is not seeking to have every station sympathetic to its cause, but only requires that radio stations go about their duties in a professional manner that "shows objectivity, balance and accuracy." "This is not a spontaneous decision�it�s a well-thought out decision�it�s a very firm and settled decision, and we are very much convinced about the rightfulness of the decision that we�ve taken�we�re not at war with them, no as I said from the very beginning, they are skewed�if they can offer a guarantee for the safety of our resource persons or communicators�For our part, we�ve assigned reasons why we took this decision�anything short of that, going back to the station is not one of the things we�re thinking about now�.These issues did not crop up just recently, it�s been going on for a considerable period of time and repeatedly we've been drawing their attention to it but now we believe at this point this is the only way out� "We�re not saying a particular radio station should align itself with us, that will either way be unfair. We prefer every radio station to go about their duties as expected and according to the journalistic profession in a manner that shows objectivity, that shows balance, that shows accuracy�and in a manner that shows that they are unbiased against any one party," James Agyenim Boateng said.