Editorial (The Daily Searchlight, 25th April, 2022)
Air Vice Marshal Michael Appiah-Agyekum, Deputy Chief of Staff in charge of Administration of the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF), has advised journalists to desist from publishing news that will compromise national security.
“We need to get to the point where no respectable news organisation has any interest in endangering soldiers or intelligence agents so that the national security is not compromised,” he said.
The Air Vice Marshal gave the advice at the inauguration of the Defence Press Corps (DPC) in Accra.
The occasion was also used to elect and swear-in an executive body to manage the corps.
Air Vice Marshal Appiah-Agyekum said the GAF and the media were two critical actors that must work together for national development, stressing “a good media-military relationship is vital for a sustainable democracy.”
He, therefore, urged the DPC to collaborate closely with GAF to develop strategies in enhancing mutual understanding.
The Daily Searchlight believes that the call should also have included a pledge by the military that it would, in the first place, ensure that the military maintain a high operational standard in all theatres of operation. The press, by and large, exist to propagate and expose wrongdoing, and where military personnel engage in unacceptable practices, it is the job of the media to expose same. Where the media fails in this endeavor, it leads to a lack of faith in the media, which would be unacceptable.
That said, it must also be pointed out that in certain situations, security personnel engage in intelligence gathering. It would be unacceptable for a media person being aware of such a situation, to expose the cover of the security person undertaking such an exercise. This again should go with the proviso that security personnel so engaged should not behave in such a way as to announce to the whole world that they are security personnel engaged in such a mission. The latter is all too common.
(This article was first published in the column EDITORIAL of the Daily Searchlight of 25/04/2022. The Daily Searchlight appears on the newsstands of Ghana every working day and for sale online twenty-four hours a day all day throughout the world on www.ghananewsstand.com).
