Media Ownership and Independence: Implications for Democratic Governance in the Fourth Republic of Ghana

Introduction This study examines how ownership of the media in a polarized political environment affects the media in the performance of their watchdog role on government. The Ghanaian constitution describes the media as a fourth estate; recognizing the media's watchdog role over the other arms of government. Indeed, many social science scholars have argued that the media's ability to hold government and other sections of society accountable to the public is the main justification for the unfettered media freedom found in many liberal democratic constitutions around the world (Roy, 2014; Tettey, 2001; Waisebord, 2009). Accountability is central to democratic governance as it gives citizens, civil society, and the private sector the ability to scrutinize public institutions and governments and to hold them to account. Schedler (1999) denotes two forms of accountability. These are answerability which holds that office holders have an obligation to inform, explain and justify their actions to electorates, and enforceability that refers to the capacity of state institutions to monitor and sanction office holders who have acted beyond their public duties so that unpopular policies and abuses of power can be challenged and reversed. Key to answerability is the performance of the daily watchdog functions of the media over the actions of state officials. Several scholars have explained this all important function of the media. For instance, Tettey (2006) argues that due to the reality that citizens cannot monitor government officials on daily basis, responsibility for doing this has fallen to the media. In the words of Grabber (2002: 143), the media is to "serve as the citizens' eyes and ears to survey the political scene and the performance of politicians ... and barks loudly when it encounters misbehavior, corruption and abuse of power by public officials." In the view of Netanel (2001), accountability is achieved when the media equips citizens with quality information on a government's performance to empower them to either maintain or vote government out. It was this recognition that made Ghana to adopt a multi-party constitution with elaborate provisions that recognize and promote pluralistic independent media (Tettey, 2001). Ghana was not the only exception, indeed almost all new and emerging democratic countries in the world adopted multiparty political systems with elaborate freedom that protects press freedom. The Ghanaian media is often referred to as the Fourth Estate of the Realm and mandated to play an effective watchdog role on governments in particular and the larger citizenry. To effectively do this, the Constitution removed what scholars have described as arbitrary barriers and impediments. These impediments included prohibiting all manner of censorship on the way of media particularly from owners-government or private (Afari-Gyan, 1998; Kumado1999). Additionally, the above legal framework coupled with other important milestones such as the repeal of the Criminal Libel Law in 2001 made Ghana an example of emerging democracy. Ghana today is seen generally as a democracy with the freest media in Africa (Freedom House, 2012; Berger, 2007). From a situation of having zero political print or electronic media in 1992, the country now boasts of over 400 registered newspapers, magazines, and journals; 286 FM radio stations; and over 28 free-to-air/subscription television stations registered in the country. Additionally, there are other multimedia outlets including online newspapers, news portals and websites run by both traditional and non-traditional media (IREX, 2012). However, these developments do not appear to match the watchdog role of the Ghanaian media as anticipated by the framers of the Constitution. This situation is not only limited to Ghana, but most media in developing countries (Kostadinova, 2015). The media has been criticized for failing to assert itself as the fourth estate over other arms of government (Muller, 2014). …