The Ghana News Agency (GNA) is the official news agency of the country of

Ghana Ghana (; tw, Gaana, ee, Gana), officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country in West Africa. It abuts the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, sharing borders with Ivory Coast in the west, Burkina Faso in the north, and To ...

. It was founded in 1957 by President

Kwame Nkrumah Kwame Nkrumah (born 21 September 190927 April 1972) was a Ghanaian politician, political theorist, and revolutionary. He was the first Prime Minister and President of Ghana, having led the Gold Coast to independence from Britain in 1957. An in ...

, Mr. Donald Wright, who was seconded by the

Reuters News Agency Reuters ( ) is a news agency owned by Thomson Reuters Corporation. It employs around 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists in about 200 locations worldwide. Reuters is one of the largest news agencies in the world. The agency was estab ...

set up the Ghana News Agency and in 1961 President Nkrumah appointed Dr. Goodwin T. Anim as the GNA's first General Manager. Some viewed the organizatioin as part of a "network of coercive and partisan institutions," in a concerted effort to present a more favorable view of the country to the outside world and to control the flow of information nationally. ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' reported in 1964 that most of the agency's news came from

Reuters Reuters ( ) is a news agency owned by Thomson Reuters Corporation. It employs around 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists in about 200 locations worldwide. Reuters is one of the largest news agencies in the world. The agency was estab ...

(it had "only a few correspondents abroad"); the agency functioned as a

gatekeeper A gatekeeper is a person who controls access to something, for example via a city gate or bouncer, or more abstractly, controls who is granted access to a category or status. Gatekeepers assess who is "in or out", in the classic words of managem ...

in that it disseminated international news to the Ghanaian press, and deleted any international news critical of the Ghanaian leadership immediately, thus preventing such news from reaching the country's newspapers and radio stations. Until the rise of the

Pan African News Agency PanaPress or Pana or PanAfrican News Agency is an African news agency. It has its headquarters in Dakar, Senegal. It was founded on 20 July 1979 in Addis Ababa by the OAU and was relaunched by UNESCO in 1993. It provides news in English, French, ...

, the GNA was considered one of the most efficient news agencies in Africa, spreading what Nkrumah called the "clear ideology of the African Revolution" and contributing to "African and Ghanaian emancipation." Initially operating as a government department, the agency became a state corporation on the day Ghana was declared a republic, in 1960. While in general the Ghanaian media are hailed as relatively free, in 2001 still the GNA was claimed to be firmly pro-government.

References

External links

* * 1957 establishments in Ghana News agencies based in Ghana Ghanaian news websites {{ghana-media-stub