Happy 76th Birthday to the Daily Graphic!

The 2nd of October should be celebrated as one of the really pivotal days in the history of the media in Ghana.

For that day in 1950 saw the birth of a technologically advanced method of producing newspapers in the country,
then known as the Gold Coast.

It wasn’t only in the printing domain that the Graphic shone (being a slick, pictorial “tabloid” in the midst of fairly stodgy broadsheets). The content was also revolutionary. Instead of long articles devoted largely to the opinions of the country’s elite, the paper was full of crisp news reports, each carrying the byline of a living person. Names like S.N. Addo, Anthony Mensah, et al.

Photographs were, as hinted earlier, generously sprinkled through the entire paper. It had a special sports section, again dominated by people with bylines, saying what they thought of the football clubs of the time and their stars!

But above all else, there were the feature articles, written by writers who had a marvellous command of the English language, and could educate and entertain at the same time: Moses Danquah, Bankole Timothy, Carl Mutt alias Henry Ofori, and women writers (such as Regina Addae)

In other words, the paper was a bomb, and rival local newspapers saw red. It had come to show them the door to the gallows, and they weren’t going to enter and come out as corpses.

Led by the Editor of one of the oldest papers, The Spectator (DR NANKA BRUCE), they tried to strangle The Graphic at birth! They petitioned the Joint Provincial Council of Chiefs (headquarters: Dodowa) not only to tell the colonial government to suppress the dangerous new paper but also to use their influence, as chiefs, to get their subjects to boycott it because it would ruin the country’s traditional way of life.

The chiefs rejected the petition. But they made a proposal to the proprietors of the Graphic. They suggested that Mr Martin Therson-Cofie, Editor of the Ashanti Times (a paper owned by the Ashanti Goldfields Corporation) be approached to become Editor of the Graphic.

It looked like a good compromise–AsAshanti Goldfields was foreign-owned, but it had done nothing the chiefs had found to be subversive of their authority.

The Daily Mirror group of London, owners of the Graphic, accepted the proposal of the chiefs and Martin Therson-Cofie, a man of moderate views, became Editor of the Graphic at a time when the Gold Coast was recovering from the political shock waves set in motion by the shooting of three Ex-servicemen by the Gold Coast police (at Osu, near the Christiansborg Castle) on 28 February 1948.