Deputy Information Minister, Pius Hadzide, says inasmuch as the feedback from Wednesday’ Presidential Media Encounter was welcomed, some are misplaced.
The Deputy Minister is particularly fighting critics who say yesterday’s event at the Jubilee House is the worst.
Mr Hadzide also said contrary to suggestions that President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo expended most of the allotted time for the programme on his opening speech, he spent even more time during the Q&A session – which many journalists at the event had been looking forward to.
“If the President invites you to a press encounter and speaks to you for 40 minutes and allows you to engage him for 55 minutes, much more time than he actually spoke to you, I think that we can say that we want more time. But we cannot say that fundamentally, the thing is flawed from the very beginning,” he said.
The Deputy Information Minister made the comments on Wednesday on PM Express, a current affairs programme on MultiTV.
He admitted that although the previous media encounter admitted more questions from journalists, there is no hard and fast rule about the number of questions admissible at such events.
“You are saying that at the last [media encounter] some 21 questions were asked. Are we saying that that met a certain benchmark? Because there is no such benchmark,” he said on the show.
President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo held his third media encounter at the Jubilee House on Wednesday, December 19.
The Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), a media rights and development champion has said it considers the engagement a crucial exercise that deepens the principles of transparency and accountability, which are key tenets in democratic governance.
MFWA commend the President and the government for maintaining the culture of open and regular media encounters, but said aspects of the programme could have been managed better.
It described the President’s comparison of the controversial medical drone deal to the botched guinea fowl project under the previous administration as petty.
Watch the full PM Express show below
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