The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Western Publications Ltd – Publishers of Daily Guide newspaper – Gina Blay has revealed that she is not a member of the New Patriotic Party (NPP).
But, speaking on Starr Chat, Wednesday, Mrs Blay, who is the wife of the acting National Chairman of the NPP, Freddie Blay, pointed out that owing to her husband’s association with the main opposition she is obligated to sympathise with the NPP.
“I’m not a member of the NPP… but I’m a sympathizer of the NPP,” she told host Bola Ray.
She continued: “It’ll be odd if I weren’t, but I’m because my husband is and the whole family is.”
Asked whether her sympathies towards the NPP makes her bias, compelling the editorial board of the Daily Guide to skew stories in favour of the NPP, Mrs. Blay answered that it was not a conscious decision to align the paper to the NPP.
She explained that when Daily Guide was started it was a sports paper and that they observed that “Kotoko players and their supporters tend to buy more papers [Daily Guide] than Hearts. So what we did was to write more Kotoko stories – so it was very vivid that we were more Kotoko bias.”
When the paper metamorphosed into politics, “it tended to be more similar because we take it that NPP and their supporters tend to buy more of Daily Guide than the NDC base,” she added.
When the host retorted that so Daily Guide is not being professional then, Mrs Blay said “We are.”
But she noted: “You have to think about the business as well. You have to think about your daily sales…in Ghana daily sales is about headlines. So you go to stories that you think your buyers will be more attracted to.”
Throughout the interview she tried to dispute the tag that the Daily Guide is an NPP tabloid saying, “I don’t think it [Daily Guide] is anti-NDC but maybe pro-NPP” as they think about business thus “it is not so much about politics.”
Asked why Daily Guide is almost against the NDC, Mrs Blay’s reply was that of a surprise. “Is it?” she asked the host rhetorically.
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