All over the world, corruption is breaking news. Central to the narrative of public opposition to the excesses of political and corporate power, corruption stories dominate the front pages of newspapers in such diverse public spheres as Japan, India, Germany, France, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, and Zambia. Consider the profusion of corruption allegations animating the pages of the private press in Ghana during the summer of 2002. A June 20 report in the Ghanaian Chronicle detailed the suspicious loss of 4.2 billion cedis (US$600,000) to the Ghana Water Company (Ohene 2002). On July 11, the paper reported on “massive embezzlement� at the nation’s premier teaching hospital, Korle-Bu (Jale 2002). Throughout July and into August, the Chronicle published reports suggesting that President John Agyekum Kufuor had diverted public funds and used the money to refurbish his private house and lawns (Archer 2002).

Since the 1990s, a free and vigorous press has been seen as central to the expression of civil society and processes of good governance in the newly democratizing states of Africa—and particularly in Ghana.1 Functionally integral to Western models of liberal democracy, the press summons the hidden, obscure operations of power into the critical light of the public sphere, providing the primary means for popular representation and the participation of citizens in political discourse while holding the state accountable to the public good.2 The role of African journalists in these processes of “good governance� has been defined fundamentally through the exposure and critique of corruption, the central theme of political opposition in the Ghanaian private press throughout the 1990s (Blay-Amihere and Alabi 1996). In liberal discourses of democracy and human rights, Ghanaian journalists would be the valiant watchdogs of the public purse, working bravely and tirelessly to hold politicians to rigorous ethical standards of fiscal accountability and professional integrity.

However, in practice, journalism is more complicated than this heroic narrative would suggest. While the news media is rhetorically critical of power and ostensibly opposed to the state, the realities of everyday journalistic practice position it at the interstices of state and society, the public and the private, interpolating journalists into the everyday practices of power in both spheres. As these practices of power routinely involve informal exchanges of money, favors, and information, such practices have become an everyday part of journalism in Ghana, both efficiently banal and ritually mysterious. This essay will explore these informal exchanges as well as the social, political, and material transformations accomplished through them and the ambivalent discourses they generate.