The Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII), an anti-graft civil society organisation, has urged the state-owned media to provide fair coverage to all political parties in the run-up to the elections.
It said that the constitution required state-owned media to give an equal platform for all political parties to promote their messages.
Mrs. Mary A. Addah, Executive Director of the GII, made the call at the media launch of a project on monitoring campaign spending, abuse of incumbency, and vote buying for comprehensive party and campaign financing reform in Ghana.
The GII and the Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) are working to collect new empirical data on campaign finance activities to increase public awareness on the role of money in elections.
Mrs Addah called for a review of the political party act to include punitive actions against the incumbents that use state resources and platforms to execute political agendas.
She said that the GII would closely monitor the incumbent party’s use of state resources to carry out its political agenda in the 2024 general elections.
Mrs. Addah said the abuse of public resources by the incumbent party during elections was typical in many countries, including Ghana.
Examples include the ruling party’s election campaign team using official vehicles or buildings illegally, state media manipulation, and the use of security agencies to intimidate opponents.
Mrs. Adda announced plans to estimate state-owned media bias in a bid to assess incumbency abuse in the 2024 general elections.
She said the organization would estimate the bias in state media coverage and reporting for the incumbent party’s presidential campaigns using a nationally representative sample of constituents.
Professor George Ofosu, a lecturer at the London School of Economics, explained that estimating the media bias of state-owned media would include monitoring of political advertisements and campaign coverage. \
“We aim to train and deploy experts for a period of three months from September to December to conduct monitoring.
“This includes observation and reporting on campaign events and material in selected constituencies for all presidential candidates.
“Then there will be a media monitoring system to record advertising in print and other forms of media channels to assess the extent of bias in state-owned media,” he said.
GNA