A member of the National Media Commission (NMC), Nii Laryea Sowah has hinted that the Commission is seeking a constitutional review to clothe it with powers to withdraw the licenses of recalcitrant media houses who refuse to abide by professional and ethical guidelines. He told Adom News on the fringes of the ongoing 15th Highway Africa Conference that the NMC did not need teeth to bite harder at the media, but it felt that to consolidate the hard-earned press freedom, it was important for the NMC to have those powers to prevent the few recalcitrant practitioners from destroying the integrity of the entire media in Ghana. “We have made submissions to the Constitutional Review Commission seeking reviews in Act 449, to enable us to withdraw the licenses of newspaper operators who refuse to abide by the professional guidelines and refuse to yield to amicable settlement processes of the NMC.” “We are also seeking to have the licensing authority for radio and television stations transferred from the National Communications Authority to the NMC so that we can ensure sanity in the electronic media too,” he said. Mr. Sowah however noted that the NMC preferred freedom of the press and self-regulation by the media, to giving the NMC powers that politicians could take undue advantage of and use the NMC to gag the media. He had early on delivered a paper on Media Regulation in Ghana at the conference, where he pointed out that the 18-member NMC was the only completely independent and properly representative commission out of four commissions established by the 1992 Constitution. Mr. Sowah, who is also the General Secretary of the Private Newspapers Association of Ghana (PRINPAG) noted that unlike the other three commissions, an overwhelming majority of the members of the NMC were nominated by institutions outside of government and were therefore very independent minded. He said the NMC used mediation and specific guidelines as a way of keeping the media within professional and ethical behaviour, adding however, that the media in Ghana are largely self-regulatory through the Ghana Journalists Association‘s (GJA) Code of Ethics, and in-house professional guidelines by individual media houses. Meanwhile another panelist at the conference, Robert Kabushenga from Uganda insisted that self-regulation was not the best for the media in Africa because there were several undesirable characters in the media who abuse freedom of the press. “In our profession we have clowns, comedians, conspiracy theorists, pirates and all sorts of characters being given so much space and when they are challenged they are branded as journalists who must be protected.” He said the media must be regulated by the government in the same way other professionals like doctors, lawyers, architects and others are regulated by the government in the interest of the public. “Regulation is an administrative role and that is what governments do – we regulate the media in their own interest because if we don’t there will be mob action against the media as people offended by the media will take the law into their own hands and revenge,” he said. Mr. Kabushenga likened journalists to quack doctors who subject unsuspecting patients to danger because they are not regulated, and described journalists who are opposed to government regulating the media as paranoid for raising concerns about government stifling press freedom. He pointed out that the courts in Uganda had no restrictions as to what fine they could put on media houses as damages, adding that so far only three court cases have been ruled in favour of the media and many media houses have been inconvenienced by government regulations. Mr. Kabushenga said African governments could not wait for the media to start hacking into people’s privacy like Rupert Murdock’s News of the World did in UK before starting to regulate the media – “we must start now.” GJA President Ransford Tetteh, who is also attending the conference, disagreed with Mr. Kabushenga saying “he and his government are rather paranoid for likening the media to quack doctors as if the entire media is a criminal institution.” He noted that stifling press freedom did not only affect journalists but the entire society whose voices and concerns the media projects. Mr. Tetteh noted that in Ghana, the GJA Code of Ethics, the NMC guidelines and in-house guidelines in various media houses had conspired to provide an effective self-regulatory mechanism, and that was good enough, compared to the period before the fourth republic when the government censored media content and denied Ghanaians freedom of expression. “I do not think our NMC needs teeth to bite any harder at the media, and I definitely disagree with government regulating the media because people can always go to court when they think their rights have been violated,” he said. South African Veteran Journalist, Mondli Makhunya said South Africa has a state-appointed Press Ombudsman who has a journalism background to regulate the print media. “We live in fear of the Ombudsman because when you go wrong he usually bites where it hurts most – your credibility – and when you lose your credibility you should as well go out of business,” he said. He said there was also the Broadcasting Regulatory Commission which regulates the electronic media and usually punishes through fines instead of hitting at the media house’s credibility. Several delegates at the conference took turns to hit at the Ugandan regulatory system, describing it as tyrannical, control of people’s right to free thinking and free speech, while others suggested that Africa should look at Ghana’s example as a model for media regulation across the continent.