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The late Sam Arthur, doyen of journalism training in Ghana, made a remark on the first day of our batch at the Ghana Institute of Journalism that has forever defined news to me as a journalist. �When you are sent to cover Jesus Christ and Satan arrives instead, the latter event is an even bigger news item.� Old Sam drove that fact into our brains. In effect, mainline activity is not the kind of news any serious newsman should worry his or her head about. When the state of Ghana spends the nation�s hard-earned resources to showcase what propaganda agents say is the achievement of an administration at a time school fees for second cycle schools have gone through the roof and first year students cannot ever report to school, the event is not of much consequence to the people of this country, many of whom cannot afford a single decent meal for the family. On the other hand, when it emerges that the hopeless organization of such an event results in Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executives, who connived to spend the little money in the kitty for development on such a frivolous event, could not be given seats at a function they organized, that is where the news peg is. If as a senior journalist who spent several years helping to shape the Ghana News Agency and who on account of such an experience now runs the Information portfolio, Mr. John Akolgo-Tia, cannot appreciate this simple axiom in news reporting, then he could not have been a good example for cub reporters to learn from in those �golden� years of his at GNA. Journalists, particularly those of us in private practice, will not and cannot be propaganda agents for a fumbling administration. That is why a sheep cannot be a cow under any circumstances, whether Deputy Information Minister, Mohammed Baba Jamal was joking or threatening staff at the Information Services Department, to tow the line or risk being fired. The heart of Mr. Akolgo-Tia has a right to bleed for the kind of examples being set for the young generation, especially when so-called Presidential aides descend on the Information Ministry and sign for and receive fat cheques that would end up in hampers, that the intended targets never obtain. One quotable quote really freaks me from the Honourable Minister of Information�s outbursts. �It is a shame how the media landscape has become. If you look at the kind of criticism the media is receiving today, we are inflicting all these pain on ourselves. I wonder the kind of future we are creating for the next generation.� It is a source of worry that journalism like any other profession in Ghana is receiving so much by way of a bashing. But when a Minister of Information is so anonymous in his performance of duty, and his deputy Ministers speak for the President, then we have a very serious probem. If Mr. Akolgo-Tia cares to know, many are Ghanaians wondering where he has been all this while, when his two deputies -Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa and Baba Jamal, have been fronting for the Ministry and speaking for the President, as if they were the front men in charge. In every profession, there is the good, the bad and the ugly. No one disputes the fact that some members of the inky fraternity have done a lot of harm to the journalism profession. There are men and women out there parading the corridors of journalism, who have very little or no respect for the code of ethics of the profession. There are those too, who are anonymous in the performance of their duties. Equally, there are brilliant individuals out there, who are an inspiration to the profession and the nation at large. The peculiar nature of journalism is such that mistakes are there for everybody to see. As I continue to pontificate, when a judge makes a mistake, the accused person goes to jail quietly. Similarly, the mistake of a doctor is hidden in a terse message. The patient died after a short illness. That is why no one begrudges the Minister of Information on his damning verdict on media practice in the country. Some of us, though, would not accept the damning verdict from a person who has virtually abdicated his position to his deputies and has suddenly discovered his voice only when journalists have failed to be propaganda tools to an administration that is taking the good people of this nation for a jolly good ride, and want to use the media to paint a picture that does not exist. For all the Minister�s vetuberations, it cannot mask the fact that this administration has failed to deliver. Some of us cannot be used to paper the cracks in an administration that has been a disappointment from the day President John Evans Atta Mills stumbled to the podium, and fluffed his lines at the swearing in ceremony, at the Independence Square on January 7, 2009. After taking the media to the cleaners, Mr. Akolgo-Tia woke up to the realization that the media would be needed to down-play the failures of the Mills Administration and prop it up, as election 2012 draws nearer. Suddenly, the media are partners that should bring government achievements to the people. Like the small girl told her class teacher: �You doesn�t know.� Journalists, like the rest of society, are learning fast. When Ministers and their deputies are competing with themselves on the property market, newsmen cannot continue to be used by politicians as election heat reaches fever point, only to be discarded when the vote is in hand and the power begins to be exploited, to improve their lives and that of their cronies. Did I read Mohammed Baba Jamal accusing journalists of being good for nothing and failing to see anything good in this administration? In a moment like this, I recall the claim by the Deputy Minister, who uses Akwatia as tool for his political rise, that he traces his ancestry to Ajumako Kokoben, and that he is a member of the Kona clan. My late father, Kwesi Adobah, was a member of the Kona clan, who migrated to Ekumfi- Ekrawfo from Ajumako Kokoben. If Baba Jamal�s claim is true, then he is my father, according to the custom and practices of the Fantes. It would be unbecoming of me to hold my father up to public ridicule, which is why I am unable to go to town on his pronouncements. A goat and a cow could only become partners in the new theory of doublespeak. In a regime in which the command of the Head of State could translate into University lectures being organized without the assembly of both the academic and administrative staff in a forest environment, it takes extra-ordinary genius in the journalist to reduce the magical transformation of the nation to the understanding of the people. Nearly one year after the good professor cut the sod for commencement of the construction of 30,000 unit houses for the security services, for which the state of Ghana gave up its sovereign guarantee in return for a loan of US$1.5 billion, the various sites are only gathering weeds. In a situation like this, how does the journalist conjure a good image of the professor and his government? Lest I forget, a new magical feat has just been achieved in the cocoa sector, thanks to the �I Care Fo You� administration of the professor. A bag of cocoa used to weigh 60 kilograms. Until the new cocoa season, it was bought for GH�200. Now, the government has instructed that a bag of the beans should sell for GH�205. Already, the propaganda machine is at its zenith in the rural communities, painting a very caring administration that has added to the purchasing power of the cocoa farmer. What has not been explained to these poor farmers, who break their backs to help build the nation, is that by a very strange system that is only known to those building a �Better Ghana�, when the whole edifice is collapsing, one bag of cocoa now weighs 64 kilograms. If 60=GH�200, then the four additional kilos would be GH�13.3 In other words, while the government has added GH�5 to the cost of a bag of cocoa, it has craftily taken away GH�13.3. Therefore, cocoa farmers would be worse off by GH�13.3 �GH�5. The new magic wand would reduce farmers income on every bag of cocoa by GH�8.3 cedis. In the propaganda theory of my �good father�, I am supposed to tell the farmers that they are doing well under the �Better Ghana� agenda, which in all probabilities would not happen. Some of us are unable to conceptualize the workings of a regime, which is nearly three years old at the seat of Government, and still performs as if it is still on the campaign trail. To state that this administration is a disaster is to state the obvious, which is why selling the concept of the goat as a cow would take some doing!