January is harmattan season in Accra, Ghana. Yellow dust billows off the Sahara, but this year from the east, the failed nyan elections blew their own hot storm. Ghana, fifty years independent and proud, confidently embraced democracy fifteen years ago. Now President John Kufuor, who chairs the African Union Assembly, was called to Nairobi to shore up democracy there. The Ghanaian media smile on every international display of the nation's leadership capacity, as if the rise of Kofi Annan had sealed the matter for all time, but as Kufuor headed to Kenya, the local press debated a question that seems inevitable in this breathless age: "Could a Kenya happen here?" It could not. Ghana's fractures and potential fractures are not as deep as Kenya's, and they are not primarily ethnic. Although elections in new democracies-Ghana's will come in December-always risk cleaving the polity, a superheated Ghana would likelier melt than splinter. The hypothetical question of "Could a Kenya happen here?" is most interesting not for its incisiveness, but for the way it grips the media professionals responsible for shaping Ghanaian political discourse. The question captures the gravitational pull of the grand imaginary in the African press, the lure of the lurid, the condition of reporters in most of Africa today: eager to be professional, relevant, and hard-hitting; prepared to raise big questions abstractly, but cautious, even diffident on details. In reporting, the small questions give traction. But as state officials and others in Africa learn to use new soft methods of press control, the small questions are becoming the hard ones for journalists to ask. Democratization swept Africa in the early 1990s, bringing to most of the continent's fifty-three countries forward-looking constitutions, representative government, multiparty elections, and the legitimate rule of law. Part of the normal package of democratization and of the structural adjustment that coincided with it was media liberalization. Abolition of newspaper licensing laws opened the way for private, commercial, competitive print journalism. Deregulation and privatization of broadcast media did the same for radio and television. State-owned media outlets were cut loose. Newspapers, radio, and television in Africa boomed. In Ghana, media liberalization commenced in 1992 as President Jerry Rawlings, former flight lieutenant and coup maker, converted democrat, came to understand the new neoliberal realities. By the mid-1990s, dozens of poorly printed but scrappy newspapers crowded each other at the kiosks. New radio stations up and down the dial filled the airwaves with a mix of highlife, rap, country, and lots of talk. Telenovelas imported from Mexico and Brazil and dubbed into Ghanaian English, as well as endless politically oriented public affairs shows, streamed into living rooms and storefronts where Ghanaians gathered for television. Tensions soon developed between government and the privatized media. Rawlings was accustomed to the old ways of controlling reporters-heavy-handed intimidation, physical assault, and jail-but in a law-bound society these methods grew less and less effective. So did his government. By 2000, Rawlings had expended his constitutionally allotted time, and elections that year brought the opposition to power. John Kufuor, the new president, owed a debt to the press. During his campaign, he had seduced Ghana's media with promises no self-respecting journalist could ignore: greater freedom of expression, repeal of criminal libel laws, and even a Freedom of Information Act based on the American model. Kufuor told the press and the nation during his campaign, "Demand transparency from your government!" Such words are music to any reporter's ears. Soft Control Seven years into the Kufuor era, many Ghanaian journalists laugh at the thought that this government once was considered a friend to the press. The promised Freedom of Information Act never materialized. Criminal libel has been abolished, but the government still uses civil libel laws to discipline reporters when necessary. More fundamentally, the government of Ghana, like governments throughout structurally reformed Africa, has learned to control the press in a brand-new way: softly. Soft control bludgeons no one, jails no one, directly threatens no one. It works with, not across, the grain of the social realities of journalists: their low pay, engrained respect for seniority, desire for careers, love of country, and duty to family. "We don't have soldiers crowding our streets anymore here in Ghana, so the government is more refined in its manipulation of media houses," says Robert Clegg, an attorney who hosts a television public affairs show. However, as Clegg knows, refined methods of manipulation can be quite effective. Soft control is exerted mainly by the state, but in contrast to the hard repression of the past, the state has no monopoly on it. Media owners use soft control to rein in their journalists (and they must rein them in because owners, too, are subject to the government's new light touch). Newly empowered national and international business firms also employ the new methods to very good effect. What is soft control? It is the panoply of blandishments, inducements, and small blockages that mediasavvy institutions employ to influence press coverage wherever market forces and a free press create an information hurly-burly. Education, training, and travel opportunities offered to working journalists are soft control. So are selective credentialing, selective access to government and business officials, scoops presented on a platter, and, of course, gifts-what Ghanaians call soli. In Ghana, many observers of the press argue that soit is out of control. "It's over-thetop, outrageous these days," says E. GyimahBoadi, the executive director of the Ghana Center for Democratic Development. He and others point to the particular advantages that foreign corporations (mainly South African) take to ensure "balanced reporting" on, say, the new factory or commercial development going up on the edge of town. The overseas junket for just the right set of media owners, editors, and reporters often will do the trick nicely. Sometimes government and business overstep the boundaries of good taste. In late 2006, the then Minister of Information provided free mobile phones to favored journalists, a valuable consideration in a profession that trades in communication, but his attempt to curry favor backfired when reporters who did not benefit from this generosity cried foul in the press. The Accra Daily Mail's editor, Harruna Attah, says that he regularly fields telephone calls from government officials and business executives asking, "Where's the story I'm wanting to see?"- a sure sign that one of his reporters has gone entrepreneurial. Source: Dissent