Journalistic roles and political parallelism in a volatile society: The case of Ethiopia
The aim of this contribution is to study political parallelism in the media in a volatile society – Ethiopia. Political parallelism is often observed in transitional countries such as Ethiopia, but analyses tend to look at ownership only while the degree to which political affiliation transpires in media content is understudied. The paper takes up the challenge by assessing sources and journalistic performance in media outlets of diverse ownership in Ethiopia (state media, state-affiliated outlets, and independent outlets). The results show that the loyal-faciliator role is dominant among six pre-defined journalistic roles across all studied media outlets. However, the role is substantially more pronounced in the state and state-affiliated outlets than in independent outlets. The watchdog and interventionist roles are almost non-existent in the state media, but partly observed in independent channels. The paper argues that analysing journalistic roles through study of media content is a fine-grained method to detect political parallelism.
Publisert i ICA pre-conference (Toronto, Canada), 2023
Les artikkelen her