The Soul Beat 174 - Media Freedom and Development in Africa

From SOUL BEAT AFRICA - where communication and media are central to AFRICA's social and economic development

In this issue of The Soul Beat:

* MONITORING MEDIA FREEDOM - assessing media landscapes and monitoring methodologies...
* MEDIA DIVERSITY AND DEVELOPMENT - public broadcasting and gender representation...
* ETHICS IN THE MEDIA - bribery and corruption in African journalism...
* MEDIA AND THE DIGITAL FUTURE - prospects and problems in a digital age...

To commemorate World Press Freedom Day on May 3 2011, this edition of The Soul Beat shares a selection of experiences, research, and resources from the Soul Beat Africa website on issues related to media freedom and media development in Africa. The newsletter focuses specifically on media monitoring and assessment, media ethics, and the opportunities and challenges facing the media in a digital age.

According to UNESCO, World Press Freedom Day "serves as a reminder to governments of the need to respect their commitment to press freedom and is also a day of reflection among media professionals about issues of press freedom and professional ethics. Just as importantly, World Press Freedom Day is a day of support for media which are targets for the restraint, or abolition, of press freedom. It is also a day of remembrance for those journalists who lost their lives in the exercise of their profession." (From the World Press Freedom Day 2011 event website. This year the theme for World Press Freedom Day is "21st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers".

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MONITORING MEDIA FREEDOM

1.Africa Press Freedom Report 2009: Making Press Freedom a Common Good in Africa
By Libasse Hane and Gabriel Baglo
According to the publishers, the International Federation of Journalists, press freedom is still in danger in Africa despite 20 years of democratisation. Independent journalism continues to be a perilous profession on the continent, both in the peaceful arena as well as in conflict zones. This report, published in December 2009, takes stock of press freedom violations with an emphasis on journalists killed, those who are currently in jail or on trial because they dared to inform, and those who are subjected to threats, intimidations, and attacks of all sorts.

2.Accountability, Transparency, and Freedom of Expression in Africa
By Anges Callamard
This article, published in the Social Research journal by Article 19 in December 2010, looks at positive changes that have taken place in Africa around freedom of expression, particularly press freedom and free speech, but argues that there remains much unfinished business and many unfulfilled promises. These include stalled legal reform, limited media pluralism, and a lack of political will to move from the rhetoric of transparency to its reality.

3.Africa Media Sustainability Index 2009 - The Development of Sustainable Independent Media in Africa
The 2009 edition of the Africa Media Sustainability Index (MSI), published by the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) in December 2010, provides an analysis of the media environment in 40 countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. By "sustainability", IREX refers to the ability of media to play its vital role as the "fourth estate". How sustainable is a media sector in the context of providing the public with useful, timely, and objective information? How well does it serve as a facilitator of public discussion? To measure this, the MSI assesses five "objectives" that shape a media system: freedom of speech, professional journalism, plurality of news, business management, and supporting institutions.

4.Perceptions and Realities in Assessing Media Landscapes: The African Media Barometer (AMB) in Practice
By Rolf Paasch
In 2004, the Media Project of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Africa and the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) started developing the African Media Barometer (AMB), which is designed to provide a bi-annual, in-depth, and comprehensive description of the media situation in 25 African countries. This short paper from 2009 reflects on the methodological and practical problems in developing and implementing the African Media Barometer. According to the report, though there are some shortfalls with the tool, the need for analysing media landscapes is a prerequisite for effective media development and successful democracy promotion.

5.Evaluating the Evaluators: Media Freedom Indexes and What They Measure
By John Burgess
This report, published by the United States (US)-based Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) in September 2010, examines the strengths and shortcomings of existing media freedom indexes - for instance, those compiled by Freedom House, the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), and Reporters Without Borders (RSF in its French initials) - and offers recommendations to improve them. It originated from a workshop convened at the Annenberg School for Communication in November 2007. Entitled "Measuring Press Freedom and Democracy: Methodologies, Uses, and Impact," the daylong gathering brought together experts to discuss the increasingly pressing issue of how to measure media freedom worldwide - in particular, those countries receiving media development aid.

MEDIA DIVERSITY AND DEVELOPMENT

6.Public Broadcasting in Africa Series
The Public Broadcasting in Africa Series is a research project of the Open Society Institute (OSI) that aims to collect, collate, and write up information about regulation, ownership, access, performance, and prospects for public broadcasting reform in Africa. According to the research, availability and access to information by a greater number of citizens is a critical part of a functioning democracy and a country's development. The role of a public broadcaster as a vehicle through which objective information and diverse perspectives are transmitted into public domain cannot be overstated.

7.Media Diversity Center (MDC) - Kenya
The MDC is a Kenyan-based initiative, launched in 2009 by the African Women and Child Feature Service, that works to strengthen the liberty, quality, variety, and integrity of mass media in Kenya. Its core activities are: the generation and dissemination of research and knowledge; training; production; collection and distribution of information and knowledge; and media monitoring. One of its key programme activities is the establishment of Content Centres which seek to provide opportunities for gathering, processing, and disseminating content from different parts of the country, covering a variety of social concerns which are often left out of mainstream media.

8.The Media We Want: The Kenya Media Vulnerabilities Study
By Peter Oriare, Rosemary Okello-Orlale, and Wilson Ugangu
This report, published by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) in Kenya in June 2010, presents the findings of a study conducted by the African Woman and Child Feature Service (AWC) and Media Diversity Centre (MDC) that aimed to investigate the underlying factors that influence media behaviour and to make recommendations on how the sector could be reformed in a manner that would approximate Kenyans' expectations. The study shows that the Kenyan media have been operating in an unpredictable and swiftly changing political, social, cultural, economic, and technological environment. In addition, a hostile and inadequate political, legal, policy, and regulatory environment continues to negatively impact on the media in Kenya.

9.Global Media Monitoring Project 2010
This 4th Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) Report, published by the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) in September 2010, summarises research in 108 countries conducted to document trends in the portrayal and representation of women and men in news media discourse and imagery. Every 5 years since 1995, the GMMP has documented trends in the portrayal and representation of women and men in news media discourse and imagery. Findings show that news media still show significant gender bias, with 46% of news stories reinforcing gender stereotypes, only 13% of news stories focusing centrally on women, and expert commentary overwhelmingly male, with only one female in every five experts.

ETHICS AND THE MEDIA

10.African Communication Research: Ethics in the Newsroom
By Bernardin Mfumbusa (Editor) and Robert A. White (Coordinating Editor)
African Communication Research is a peer-reviewed journal which seeks to help bring African communication researchers into dialogue and debate about their common efforts with the aim to strengthen African theories and methods around communication for development. It is published three times a year by the Faculty of Social Sciences and Communications at St. Augustine University of Tanzania, Mwanza, Tanzania. This issue of the journal, published in September 2008, focuses on ethics in the newsroom and features a range of articles from across Africa.

11.African Communication Research: Bribery and Corruption in African Journalism
By Bernardin Mfumbusa (Editor) and Robert A. White (Coordinating Editor)
This edition of the African Communication Research, published in December 2010, focuses on the issue of bribery and corruption, looking specifically at the "brown envelope" phenomenon in African journalism from a variety of perspectives and countries in Africa.

12.Voluntary Media Council of Zimbabwe (VMCZ) - Zimbabwe
VMCZ is a professional media self-regulatory body set up in 2007 by Zimbabwean journalists and other stakeholders in civil society who subscribe to the principles of media freedom, accountability, independence, and ethical journalism. VMCZ's mission is to promote a strong and ethical media with the ability to contribute to building a more democratic and just society within policy and legal environments that facilitate growth and development of independent, pluralistic, and free media.

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UNESCO PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTIC STANDARDS AND CODE OF ETHICS WEBSITE

This website is a public knowledge resource on media accountability issues and provides an overview of existing media accountability mechanisms in Europe, Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. The website lists partners and professional networks working in the field of media accountability and self-regulation on regional, national, and international levels. It also provides relevant media standards for different countries around freedom of expression, access to information, and ethical and professional standards in journalism.

Click here for the Africa section on the UNESCO Professional Journalistic Standards and Code of Ethics website.

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MEDIA AND THE DIGITAL FUTURE

13.Doing Digital Media in Africa: Prospects, Promises and Problems
This publication from July 2009 is based on the latest Africa Media Leadership Conference which was convened in Uganda in May 2008 by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung's (KAS) Media Programme and Rhodes University's Sol Plaatje Institute for Media Leadership (SPI). In light of the general global decline in newspaper circulation and the increasing use of online media, the theme of the conference was "Doing Digital Media in Africa", focusing on the wide range of digital media elements and their impact on traditional media. This collection of essays and analyses from journalists and media professionals is derived from that conference, and looks at the diverse and unique ways in which African media houses are experimenting and innovating to meet tomorrow's media challenges today.

14.Beyond Broadcasting: The Future of State-owned Broadcasters in Southern Africa
By Guy Berger, Fackson Banda, Jane Duncan, Rashweat Mukundu, Zenaida Machado, and Libby Lloyd
This report, published in September 2009 by Highway Africa, School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University in South Africa, is a review of how digitisation is impacting on media in Southern Africa, and especially how the new digi-scape is impacting on state-owned broadcasters. It looks at current trends like digital migration, cellphone interaction, newsroom convergence, policy, economics, and new non-conventional media players. The purpose of this paper is to promote discussion on public broadcasting and broadcasting policy and regulation in Southern Africa, specifically in Namibia, Mozambique, Zambia, and South Africa. According to the report, there are complicated changes facing state-owned broadcasters in Southern Africa, which are being shaped around the digitisation of production, distribution, and consumption of public interest news and current affairs.

15.Harnessing Africa's Digital Future
Edited by Francis Mdlongwa and Moagisi Letlhaku
This collection of essays, stories, and testimonies, published by Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS) in December 2010, provides perspectives from heads of Africa's media about the nature, power, and influence of emerging digital media channels and how Africa is tapping into these channels to better serve their markets. According to the editors, the experiences shared by contributors show that most African and even top global media firms are still not reaping sustainable profits from the emerging platforms. However, they add that Africa's media has taken the first steps to harness these technologies to improve their businesses to serve a rapidly transforming market.

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The Soul Beat 147 - Media for Development in Africa

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