The airwaves have been giving one a headache these past few days.
Mainly because TV presentations in particular, are largely devoid of professional competence.
Those who invented TV stations realised that TV can be a major turn-off to its intended audience. So they instructed TV producers to observe certain rules.
One of these is that no one person should be allowed to monopolise a segment in a programme. Otherwise he/ she would force the minds of viewers to go to sleep. Eventually, viewers would get up to go and do something else! And the no doubt sensible things being said by the speaker, would go to waste.
Hence it is recommended that moving pictures and graphics should be inserted in presentations to reduce their intrinsic distraction/boredom factor.
But some clever TV producers, excited by their subject matter, assume that viewers would also be necessarily excited and sit and watch as speakers droned on. Big mistake!
If there were Nielsen ratings in Ghana, I am sure the presentation on the “Nolle Prosequi” entered by the current Attorney-General in the bank scandal case, would be found to have annoyed many viewers
First and foremost, the principal speaker in the JOYNEWS programme on the issue should have been made to trim down his facts a bit. There are no facts that cannot be summarised. To drone on and on about bank balance sheets and audit reports with all their adjuncts and qualifications or caveats, makes for very poor TV. In the JOYNEWS programme, this was worsened by the fact that the speaker rushed through his words too fast. This would have got on the nerves of some viewers even if the speaker had possessed a pleasant voice and general manner. This one was no such person, I am afraid!
The matter at issue, however is of such great importance that it shouldn’t be left to boring accountants and lawyers to kill the interest which ordinary citizens naturally entertain about it.
Should the AG, in the name of “pragmatic” wisdom, ignore the deterrent effect that the framers of the banking laws intended when they made banking malfeasance an offence that can attract BOTH loss of liberty and forfeiture of assets?
The AG should realise that citizens are aware that the proverbial “goat thief ” who is sent to jail is also a human being, despite his lack of status and a huge portfolio of wealth and its trappings. That issue must be debated by the public in whose name the banking laws were enacted. TV producers must not be allowed to throttle that debate with incompetent presentations. Of course they do have their difficulties and one sympathises with that. But public policy is too important to be allowed to perish through an inability to distinguish between objective factors and subjective ones. The AG could conceivably be acting subjectively and if that is so, it must be demonstrated to him clearly and succinctly, without incompetent obstruction.
BY CAMERON DUODU