An Assessment of the Level of Compliance with Regulations of Selected Media Houses in Accra
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Date
2010
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Abstract
Since the Ghanaian media was liberalized in 1996, there has been a proliferation of media houses and regulators with radio and television being the most vibrant and easily accessible.
After more than a decade of the liberalization of the media, and the subsequent establishment of regulations the nation is still battling with the challenge of compliance with regulations. Therefore it is only prudent to determine the extent to which radio and television stations have complied with the existing regulations and the factors impeding the compliance.
This was the main reason for which this study was carried out in Accra. The main objective of this study was to assess the level of compliance of the media houses with the regulations governing their operations for them to play their role in the development of the country.
Geographically, the study focused on Accra, with the reason being that, after the liberalization, the media started its growth from there. Also Accra has been the hub of the media, hosting the headquarters of almost all television stations and to some extent the radio stations. The case study method was used for the study. A combination of probability (the cluster and simple random sampling techniques) and non probability sampling methods (the purposive sampling technique) were employed in the selection of samples for data collection for this study.
From the analysis, it became clear that the major challenge of the implementation of the media regulations was the lack of the legal backing for the media regulators. Though the knowledge level about compliance issues was established to have been known, the details were not known and this was attributed to the lack of enforcement of sanctions by the regulators who were in turn hampered by the lack of legal backing. With the passage of the NCA Act and the Electronics Communications Act in December 2008 and the yet to be passed broadcasting law, it is hoped that a lot more media houses would conform to the existing media regulations.
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A Thesis submitted to the School of Graduate Studies, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree Of MASTER OF SCIENCE in Development Policy and Planning.