…As CSA Urge media to protect against cyber siege
TNR Files
For three decades, Ghana’s private press has operated in a curious paradox. It is constitutionally protected, fiercely independent, and yet increasingly irrelevant to the average Ghanaian who now wakes up to TikTok, not the front page.
It is celebrated abroad as a pillar of West African democracy, yet at home it struggles to pay for newsprint that has nearly doubled in price since 2020. And while it once exposed tyrants and chronicled the nation’s democratic journey, it now finds itself competing for attention with unverified videos, AI-generated deepfakes, and coordinated disinformation campaigns that move faster than any editorial process.
Against this backdrop, the Private Newspapers and Online News Publishers Association of Ghana (PRINPAG) gathered its members at the Platinum Bay Hotel in Abokobi on 29-30 August for a capacity-building workshop on “Responsible Security Reporting”. The stated aim was to strengthen the media’s role as a strategic partner in national security. The unstated one acknowledged in private conversations and hinted at in public addresses was survival.
The Security Chief’s Gambit
National Security Coordinator COP Osman Abdul-Razak delivered what many participants described as an unusually conciliatory keynote. His message was striking not for its content but for its tone: he offered to establish a “standard channel of dialogue” between security services and newsrooms, so that “clarity replaces speculations in moments of national anxiety”.
“My office is ready to work with you on guidelines of security reporting drawn up with you and not for you,” Abdul-Razak told the assembled editors and publishers. He insisted that PRINPAG should propose how to proceed, not wait for National Security to impose rules.
Using a driving analogy borrowed from his law school days, he urged journalists not to “drive in the middle” when they know what is right. “For you to be able to choose a position it means you have done your research very fine and you know what is right and you have the courage to do it. If it’s wrong you say it. If it’s right you say it. You don’t stay in the middle,” he said.
The offer of a verification hotline a channel for rapid fact-checking during security incidents was welcomed by PRINPAG president David Tamakloe, though some members expressed private scepticism about whether such mechanisms would be used for genuine cooperation or informal censorship.
The President’s Lament
Tamakloe’s opening address was less diplomatic. He spoke of a “war of confusion” surrounding the media, describing an industry abandoned by the state and left to “fight for its place in the long history of human development and democracy”. He reserved his sharpest criticism for the so-called “new media,” which he dismissed as a dangerous lie.
“The madness we witness on social media is NOT journalism,” Tamakloe declared. “Journalism is a noble profession that has shaped humanity for centuries. It has exposed tyranny, championed the oppressed, and chronicled the triumphs of the human spirit. We must not throw this profession under the bus simply because we have grown intolerant of divergent views or, worse, because we are unwilling to finance its growth”.
The numbers bear out his desperation. In 2005, the Daily Graphic sold over 100,000 copies a day. Today, with double the population, circulation is a fraction. Newspaper purchases by public institutions have dropped over 70% in a decade. In 2016, print took about 30% of advertising spend in Ghana. Today, less than 7%. Google and Meta now capture over 60% without employing a single reporter in Accra.
The Cost of Failure
The workshop’s facilitators did not spare the media from uncomfortable truths. Deputy Government Communications, Shamima Muslim on behalf of her Minister, Felix Kwakye Ofosu, in her closing remarks, catalogued the cost when the “holy alliance” between politics and journalism breaks down.
He cited the Konkomba-Nanumba war of 1994-95, where 2,000 lives were lost and 150,000 displaced some media coverage, he said, framed it as “settler vs indigene,” a simplistic binary that poured petrol on the flames. He recalled the 2002 murder of Ya-Na Yakubu Andani II in Dagbon, where inflammatory radio and leaflets preceded the violence, and sensational headlines afterwards hardened Tamale into Abudu versus Andani for 16 years.
More recently, Bawku. From 2021 to 2025, over 300 deaths. Every time an online portal publishes unverified casualty figures or uses ethnicised language, it recruits the next fighter, Ofosu said. “Bawku is not just a security checkpoint costing GHC 10 million a year,” he added. “It is children not going to school for three years”.
The Digital Threat
Cyber Security Authority Director-General Divine Selase Agbeti, in his closing remarks, warned that the digital environment has intensified the media’s responsibility. “Cybercriminals and hostile actors exploit urgency, fear, and public trust,” he said. “They use impersonation, compromised accounts, manipulated images, synthetic audio, and coordinated disinformation to deceive citizens and distort public debate”.
He proposed five commitments: verify before amplifying; protect operations and people; build cyber-resilient newsrooms; correct misinformation visibly and quickly; and strengthen structured engagement with security institutions.
Selase Agbeti also made a pointed observation about media economics: “When a journalist’s account is compromised, the attacker gains access not only to data but also to credibility and an audience”.
A Way Forward?
The workshop closed with an unusual degree of consensus on at least one point: the status quo is unsustainable. Shamima proposed a “new pact” between government communications and the private press a secure verification channel, quarterly security briefings for editors, support for Right to Information training, and a self-regulatory code for responsible security reporting.
“Let TikTok be first,” he told the journalists. “Let PRINPAG be right”.
Tamakloe, for his part, invoked the old African proverb: “A clear conscience is a soft pillow”. Whether the pillow will be soft enough to cushion the financial blows facing Ghana’s print media remains to be seen.
What is clear is that both sides now acknowledge the stakes. Ghana sits in a neighbourhood on fire coups to the north, jihadist spillover in the Sahel, and an information war that moves faster than bullets. In such an environment, a free press is either a strategic asset or a liability. The question, as one participant put it privately, is whether the security establishment truly believes the former or is simply managing the latter.