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Indexing Initiatives and Standards of Good Practice in Monitoring and Evaluation How to measure the development of media systems and their relationship with broader
development indicators is a key question, and a number of contributors present possible instruments that are available to policy-makers and practitioners.
Mark Whitehouse of IREX presents the Media Sustainability Index (MSI) system that is in use in 38 countries in Europe, Eurasia and, most recently, the Middle East. The MSI allows the
measurement of the development of the media consistently across time and between countries. Assessing five years of application of the MSI, Whitehouse states that initial concerns that the
index would not be applicable between regions and widely diverse media systems – i.e. countries with dominant state broadcasters, others with strong private markets or with print or broadcast biases - have proven to be unfounded.
After reviewing the indicators applied by a range of organisations Antonio Lambino, Alexandra Tebay and Sarah Buzby, of the Annenberg School for Communication, propose an organising framework for monitoring and evaluation work at the macro level of the media development sector based around three categories: 1) Journalistic Practices and Management; 2) Industry
Structure and Access to Media; and 3) Legal and regulatory Environments. They also propose a
‘toolkit’ approach to monitoring and evaluation methods, from which policy-makers and practitioners should draw selectively. They call for greater collaboration between media development
professionals and social scientists stating that ‘bridging the practical and theoretical dimensions in media development is essential in making valid and reliable evidence - based claims with regard to the impact of media’.
Alan Davis, of the Institute of War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), argues for the creation of an
assessment platform that can take in both the micro dimensions, for example individual media support projects, and macro dimensions, for example of entire media systems. He calls for a
collaborative process to create good practice standards on the micro level, modelled on the Sphere project, which developed standards across the humanitarian sector in the 1990s. On macro
level indicators, he calls for the creation of an index that might build on existing indices but
would relate media sector influence on a scale to the six dimensions of governance as identified by the World Bank, i.e. i) voice and accountability; ii) political instability and violence;
MEDIA MATTERS Overview
iii) government effectiveness; iv) regulatory quality; v) rule of law, and, vi) control of corruption.
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