Six decades of foreign intervention in the African media: Towards an increasingly liberal donor agenda
This ongoing project traces African media development over the past six decades with a view to identify the major frameworks which have guided foreign media intervention. The research is based on a broad literature review and a scrutiny of 26 evaluation reports of media development programmes to identify recent trends in media development. The overall conclusion is that Western media assistance is increasingly reflecting a liberal paradigm, both on the media systems level and on the level of journalism ideology. Media development programmes emphasize the democratic functions of the media and have as one of their main objectives to introduce and strengthen independent media. Professional standards are benchmarked against globally acknowledged principles such as accuracy, fairness, balance and objectivity. The preferred professional model is monitorial journalism, while interventionist, collaborative and locally inspired frameworks have little appeal. In the 60-year period covered by the study, the modernization and Africanization paradigms are found to have faded, while the liberal paradigm has become dominant.
Publisert i Keynote address at the 11th annual EACA conference, Bujumbura, Burundi, 2022
Les artikkelen her