“The KSM Show used to be my favourite Comedy show on TV. Now, my favourite Comedy show is Good Evening Ghana,” this was a social media – Facebook, Twitter – post earlier this week by the Executive Director of the Media Foundation for West Africa.
The April 14 post even though unexplained was seen as a swipe at the manner in which the Good Evening Ghana show host Paul Adom-Otchere runs part of the program in the case of last Tuesday’s attack on journalist Manasseh Azure Awuni for a social media post that criticized President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.
On Thursday, April 15 edition of the program monitored by GhanaWeb, Adom-Otchere posited that it was a lack of grasp of hard issues and the role of the media that led some people to think that the show had taken on a comic garb.
He outlined the role of the media by way of educating, informing and entertaining its audience: “… these days they say we do something else. I’m not going to go back on that conversation but I’d pick it up another day.”
But he did not wait for another day when he continued: “Educate, entertain and inform, so we have to entertain people, we have to educate them and we have to inform them. For some people, it is only the entertainment they see. So when they watch the programme, they only see the entertainment part and they laugh.
“And because they don’t understand the other part we do, they think it is only entertainment, so they think it is a comedy show…. The education part they don’t understand, they can’t comprehend it.
The information part, they can’t receive it because they really don’t know how to decipher it. When they see the entertainment part they think that that is the only thing we do, so that’s okay,” he added without making a specific reference.
Sulemana’s views came on the back of a jab by the opposition National Democratic Congress’ General Secretary, Johnson Asiedu Nketia, who mocked political analysis by Adom-Otchere as that akin to lotto forecasters in a village.
Adom-Otchere hit back at Asiedu Nketia saying that maybe all he knew how to forecast was lotto but that on Good Evening Ghana, they engaged in political analysis from the stables of Plato and Cicero.
