• Low pay for journalists, low professional standards, and insufficient resources for investigative coverage are pervasive. African newsrooms, for instance, face a high turnover of staff, and are haemorrhaging experienced practitioners, who are pursuing more lucrative careers as public relations officers, according to Jeanette Minnie of Zambezi FoX.
• The rise of new media is corroding the economic models and dynamics of established media. Jaime Abello of the Fundacion Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano finds, for example, that in many parts of Latin America, the internet is reframing the relationship between media and audiences and heightening a perception in the continent that traditional mass media operate more as ‘power-players than as services to their citizens.’
• Local media and local political and cultural systems are running behind satellite media. The Middle East is witnessing, according to Ibrahim Nawar of the Arab Press Freedom Watch, a clash between conservative and religious TV channels on the one hand and channels carrying video clips, dance and Western music. The result is the creation of a growing chasm between two groups, one being Westernised, the other being driven to a highly defined interpretation of what traditional values are.
• There exists a body of evidence about effective media assistance work across all five regions. From the success of on-site news room training on elections coverage undertaken by Gender Links in Southern Africa to the groundbreaking work in Brazil of ANDI in increasing informed media reporting of the rights of children and adolescents, it is evident that impacts of central concern to the MDG agenda are being made.
MEDIA MATTERS : Overview
These advances are occurring in the wider context of successful defences of press independence, such as that of the victory of the Mathichon newspaper in Thailand. The efforts of dedicated journalists to hold their governments to account through the kind of investigative reporting that resulted in the first imprisonment of a government minister in Malawi for the misuse of public funds are testimony to the positive change that the sector is catalysing. These gains, although not negligible, remain isolated and vulnerable to reversal, and in order for them to be consolidated, replicated and scaled up, concerted support to the professionals working to achieve them is required.
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