Specifically, Article 162 (5) of the Constitution provides that “ All agencies of the mass media shall, at all times, be free to uphold the principles, provisions and objectives of this Constitution, and shall uphold the responsibility and accountability of the Government to the people of Ghana”. In discharging this constitutional duty, the mass media is expected to project and magnify issues of governance into the public space to provide a basis for informed debate and feedback.

This important role of facilitating democratic discourse would even be better performed if the mass media’s ability to appreciate and flag issues pertaining to public and private accountability could be strengthened. Enhanced mass media delivery on themes of transparency and accountability in governance would promote greater responsiveness from government and improve the quality and consistency of information flow to the public and institutions involved in governance but not part of the government, thereby helping to keep the affairs of government and enterprise open and above board.

Indeed, Sean Mcbride et al. (1982) has extensively dilated on the potential of news media to generate a climate for development, essentially by creating awareness and defining the issues. Defining the issues effectively requires a critical media that goes the extra mile to find out the facts behind the stories, in other words, investigates. This study relates to the definition of investigative journalism put forward by John Ullman and Steve Honeyman of the School of Journalism, University of Missouri which states that ‘It is the reporting through one’s own work product and initiative, matters of importance which some persons or organizations wish to keep secret. The basic elements are that the investigation be the work of a reporter, not a report of an investigation made by somebody else, that the subject of the story involves something of reasonable importance to the reader or viewer, and that others are attempting to hide these matters from the public”.

From the perspective of the media, the importance that events and issues have is suggested by the relative amounts and prominence of news coverage generated by those events and issues. This being the case, the amount of news space devoted to investigative stories, the content, nature, quality and credibility of those stories would help determine the extent to which the press (to which this study is directed) and by extension, the media in Ghana, provides the public with the necessary material for effective participation in the process of governance as demanded by the Constitution. In examining the quantities and quality of investigative reports in the print media, this limited study hopes to highlight the need for specialised investigative reporting and help ascertain the challenges facing the media in its efforts at investigations.

OBJECTIVES

Essentially, the study provides empirical insights into the nature and frequencies of investigative reporting in Ghana’s press, using the Daily Graphic, The Ghanaian Times, The Ghanaian Chronicle, the Crusading Guide, and The Evening News as content sources. Five broad research objectives were delineated for the study as follows:

1. To assess the state of investigative reporting in the print media

2. To measure the relative amounts of news space devoted to investigative news reports and issues by the five newspapers

3.      To discover the degrees of prominence given to such coverage

4.      To find out if stories filed were based on researched evidence, and therefore credible; or if they were based on rumour and unsubstantiated inference, and therefore speculative.

5.      To make recommendations for enhancing the capacity of journalists in investigative reporting 

METHODOLOGY

The study employed quantitative as well as qualitative research tools. The content analytic study technique provided the objective evidence for a descriptive appraisal of the contents of the selected newspapers. Content analysis as a research approach was considered a most efficient tool for investigating the presence, frequencies and prominence of coverage for investigative news items because the method is “systematic, objective and quantitative” (Wimmer and Dominick, 2000:135). This enabled the observation of any significant trends and differences among and between the newspapers and years. Secondly, by inferring from the relative amounts and prominence of coverage as content categories, suggestions could be made about both the presence (or absence) and the quality or otherwise of such stories in the newspapers. 

The qualitative dimension to the study comprised individual interviews with 10 (out of the 20) journalists who had been selected to participate in an investigative reporting training programme. Their responses, it was hoped, would constitute the “needs assessment” evidence for determining the imperative of, and strategies for, intervention.The interviews were conducted in February 2003.

Newspaper Selection:

Five newspapers, namely, the Daily Graphic, The Ghanaian Times, The Ghanaian Chronicle, the Crusading Guide and The Evening News were used for the study. The five papers were considered suitable for the study for three main reasons: their different ownership types; their varied orientations; and their respective circulations or readership characteristics.

The study was designed to span two exclusive but contiguous lunar years; viz: from Monday, January 3 to Saturday December 30 2000; and from Monday, January 1 to Saturday, December 29, 2001. These dates represent different political regimes and (consequently) media environments, and should therefore reveal any trends or variations in investigative news coverage as may be engendered by the social and political context. The data collection was undertaken in January and February 2003.

Sampling:

The Graphic, Times and (to all intents and purposes) Chronicle are daily newspapers: they are published every day of the week except on Sundays and some public holidays. These papers were therefore projected to generate a possible maximum of 313 editions each in a year (i.e., 365 days in a year minus 52 Sundays in a year). In the case of the Evening News, which is a weekday daily, a maximum of 261 issues are possible in a year (i.e., minus 52 Saturdays and minus 52 Sundays in a year). For this study, the “constructed week” technique was employed to sample for one composite week in each month of the year. Thus, for instance, the composite week for January was obtained by randomly sampling for one Monday, one Tuesday, and so on; until each day of the week had been selected. The process was repeated for the remaining 11 months (February through December) in the year. This yielded for the Graphic, Times and Chronicle, 72 edition dates (or six constructed weeks) in each year. In the case of the Evening News, the method generated 60 edition dates (also equivalent to six constructed weeks) of the paper. 

The Crusading Guide is a bi-weekly. Therefore, the paper could be expected to publish a maximum of 104 issues per year. Since the constructed week approach could not be employed here, and to cater for the possibility of low incidence when the sample size is too small, we decided to random sample 36 (i.e., about a third of the issues for a year; and one-half the sample size for the Graphic, Times and Chronicle) edition dates for the Crusading Guide. Furthermore, in order to attenuate the possibility of a skewed sample due to periodicity, we were careful to include at least three of the issues in every month.

Coding:

Two research assistants were recruited and oriented to content analyse the newspapers. Specifically, each story in the sampled newspapers was audited to locate and code every investigative report carried during the period. Budd’s (1964) attention score was used to assess the amount of news play given to each article. The nature of stories, story placements, credibility, content categories and so on were variously coded using the categories delineated in the coding sheet and attached coding guide.

Data Analyses:

The SPSS tool was used to generate tallies for the frequencies and percentages reported in the findings below. 

FINDINGS

Table 1.  Observable differences among newspapers studied

·                   Under this study, D. G  represents Daily Graphic

           G. T          “           Ghanaian Times

           G. C         “            Ghanaian Chronicle

           C. G         “            Crusading Guide

           E. N         “             Evening News

·         * The Chronicle appeared in 12 pages and 8 pages at various stages of the study.  We struck the average to obtain 10 pages per issue for the purpose of this study.

All the edition dates of the five newspapers sampled for each year produced 624 issues for the period of the study (i.e., 312 issues per year). This also translates to approximately 9,888 pages of tabloid-format newsprint over the two-year period. 

For the Graphic, the 144 issues analysed for the two years carried in total, 8,733 stories. Out of these, only 7 stories (i.e., 0.08%) in 7 issues were coded as investigative stories. Similarly, the 144 issues of the Times that were content analysed produced 8,635 stories, of which 10 stories or 0.12% were coded as investigative stories. The Chronicle generated a total of 2,009 stories. 61 of these stories, representing 3.04%, were coded as investigative stories. 72 issues of the Crusading Guide and 120 issues of the Evening News were sampled. These were coded to yield only 17 investigative stories (i.e., 1.34% of the 1,269 stories coded) for the Crusading Guide and only 14 (i.e., 0.36% of the 3,913 stories coded) stories for the Evening News. The dearth of investigative reporting in the Ghanaian press is evident when we recognize that only 0.44% (i.e., 109 stories) of the 24,559 stories contained in all the 624 issues of the five newspapers put together were investigative stories. 

In relative terms, however, it is clear that the private newspapers fared far better with frequency of investigative reports, than did the state-owned press. Indeed, the Chronicle alone recorded 27.08% or 13 more investigative stories than all the other four papers put together. The Crusading Guide, in turn, produced more than half (17 stories or 54.84%) the combined investigative stories in the Graphic, Times and Evening News (31 stories). This difference is even more significant when we consider that the combined news space of the three state-owned papers constituted 74.47% of the approximate space recorded for the five newspapers studied. In other words, relative to the mean size of each paper’s total available newshole, the Chronicle, Crusading Guide and Evening News, in that order, devoted even far more column centimetres of news print to investigative stories than did the Times and Graphic. Of the state-owned newspapers, the Evening News also carried more than 3/4 (14 stories or 82.35%) investigative stories than Graphic and Times could put together (17 stories). 

In terms of newshole devoted to investigative stories, the findings reported in Table 1 above shows that out of over a total of 709.2288 m² of news space, 5.008784 m² of news space representing less than one percent (0.71%) of the aggregates generated from all the 624 issues included in the two-year time frame of the study was devoted to investigative stories.

Table 2.  Relative proportions of investigative stories per year

A comparison of the two contiguous years selected for the study, 2000 and 2001 (representing the respective media environments under the NDC and NPP political regimes) shows that the print media under this study carried quantitatively more investigative stories in 2000 under the NDC than in 2001 under the NPP. The aggregates show that, of the 109 stories coded, more than half (52.29%) appeared in 2000 compared to 47.71% in 2001. This shows a decline of 9 stories or 15.79%.

For the independent print media (Chronicle and Crusading Guide) the aggregates show a decline in investigative stories. While the investigative stories in the Chronicle reduced from 38 stories in 2000 to 23 stories in 2001, investigative stories in the Crusading Guide decreased from 11 stories in 2000 to 6 stories in 2001.

The state-owned newspapers actually fared far better in 2001 (under the NPP), recording up to 74.19% of their collective tally of 31 investigative stories in two years. Of course, the Evening News alone took up a substantial 56.52% of the totals in 2001. On the other hand, the private newspapers registered collectively more tally counts of investigative stories in 2000 (49 stories) than in 2001 (29 stories). Between the Chronicle and Crusading Guide, however, it is noteworthy that both of them recorded more of their investigative stories in 2000 (49 stories or 62.82%) than in 2001 (29 stories or 37.18%).  

Table 3.  Story Placement

• Under this study, N represents Number of Investigative Stories Coded.

In terms of story placement, the comprehensive totals recorded show that more than 99% of the investigative stories were located on the front pages in 2000 and close to 90% appeared on the front pages in 2001. This suggests that, the general dearth of reportage notwithstanding, the editors and gatekeepers of the various newspapers accorded importance and prominence of coverage to the few investigative stories they reported. Therefore, the lack of any significant representation of investigative stories, as a content category, may only suggest a handicap in accessing or generating such stories, rather than a barometer of priority.

Table 4.  Nature of story