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Supporting independent media through coalition building - the ultimate stress test

2022-01-04T10:53:26+00:00

You could be forgiven for thinking (as I did) that coalition-building is a field of media development where international organisations can play only a modest role.

However, the experiences of local stakeholders who have been involved in long-running advocacy initiatives suggest otherwise. The “Coalitions for Change” workshop held by the PRIMED (Protecting Independent Media for Effective Development) programme, led by �鶹Լ�� Media Action, in autumn 2021 offered a unique insight into the potential for balanced partnerships between international and local actors to bring about systemic change.

Success requires understanding and political savvy

The challenges are daunting. Coalition-building is a complex set of moving parts that is, to a large extent, hostage to the vagaries of the political, economic and social landscape – and multiple factors over which international organisations have limited influence or control. There are no shrink-wrapped solutions or off-the-shelf frameworks. Success relies on an in-depth understanding of the local operating environment, trust-based relationships with key stakeholders and plenty of political dexterity.

At first glance, it is difficult to see how international organisations can bring added value to what the French would call “an internal kitchen”. It could even be argued that external support is counter-productive since there is a danger that it will be perceived as interventionist or agenda-driven. Furthermore, top-down approaches can damage the sense of ownership and buy-in which are crucial to locally driven initiatives.

Yet the PRIMED workshop showcased several examples of successful coalitions which have been steered – and, in two cases, initiated – by international partners. The mutual benefits of these relationships were clearly articulated. First and foremost, such partners can provide unique access to experience and expertise from comparable environments. The value of these peer-to-peer exchanges is self-evident. Local stakeholders are given the chance to see how similar challenges have been addressed and overcome by their counterparts in other countries. This approach works well when it comes to developing new legislation, regulatory structures or ethical codes.

The PRIMED team in Bangladesh is mentoring journalists from a regional newspaper, Daily Gramer Kagoj, among other outlets, to produce accurate and engaging online content. Credit: �鶹Լ�� Media Action Bangladesh

International support can boost local confidence

These exchanges can be instrumental in building ownership for results, as local stakeholders are empowered to decide what works for them and choose appropriate solutions. These capacity-building efforts can be rolled out in different ways – through remote exchanges between peers, through on-site mentoring or, in the case of the International Federation of Journalists’ efforts to develop a 'Declaration on Media Freedom in the Arab World', through an extensive online consultation bringing together experts from across the region.

Second, international support can be highly effective in boosting the confidence of local actors. Media practitioners often experience a sense of isolation: they believe their problems to be unique and that, in any case, the outside world is largely indifferent to the challenges they face. External support helps to demonstrate that they are not alone, that they have loyal allies in what can be a gruelling battle of wills between civil society actors and political elites. As noted Jane Chirwa at the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) in Zambia, these partnerships can also help promote international benchmarks, which serve to set the aspirations of industry players and government stakeholders alike.

The third area highlighted by PRIMED workshop participants was the role of international partners in unlocking funding streams and coordinating the efforts of the wider development community. The latter is, in my view, crucial for international support efforts worldwide and is sadly lacking in many regions. Frictions exist between implementing organisations competing for grants. There is also a spirit of competition between donor agencies which share an understandable desire to fund the most innovative projects and remain ahead of the curve. The result is widespread duplication and a limited appetite for pooling resources.

Asking for what is needed

But, for me, one of the most interesting takeaways from the PRIMED workshop was the observation that local partners should feel empowered to request the kind of support they need. Too often donors and international agencies base their programmes on assumptions and preconceptions. In extreme cases, the unwritten mantra seems to be: “Our experience in similar environments tells us that this is what you need.” Moreover, an insistence on quick-wins and time-bound results means that donors are often unwilling to invest in a slow burn, even if it has greater potential to deliver long-term impact.

Coalition-building is the ultimate stress test for effective partnerships between international partners and local beneficiaries. Coalitions require a joined up approach that takes full advantage of the unique qualities and assets that each stakeholder has to offer. They require an ability to adapt to changing circumstances and seize opportunities as and when they arise. Most of all, they depend on long-term support from international partners who are prepared to acknowledge that progress will be slow and the rewards may be very different from those which were initially envisaged.

Donors are not known for having limitless patience or sharing an appetite for risk. But if they do not invest in initiatives which can foster an enabling environment for independent media to operate, their efforts to build capacity in other areas are likely to have muted resonance.

Michael Randall has worked in the media development sector for more than 20 years, mostly for �鶹Լ�� Media Action where he led large-scale projects aimed at promoting public interest journalism in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Michael currently works as an independent consultant, focusing on project design and development as well as monitoring, evaluation and learning.

PRIMED is a ground-breaking media support project in Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Sierra Leone, led by �鶹Լ�� Media Action with support from Free Press Unlimited, International Media Support, the Media Development Investment Fund, Global Forum for Media Development and The Communication Initiative, where a version of this blog first appeared. PRIMED is funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

Efforts to support independent media are being outgunned - some thoughts on how it can fight back

2018-04-30T08:00:00+00:00

“We will support and promote the freedom of the press”, announced Penny Mordaunt, the British international development secretary in her big speech earlier this month setting out her government’s future international development strategy.

After years in the doldrums, support to independent media shows signs of being revitalised. Many other donors – from philanthropic foundations to bilateral and multilateral development agencies – are recognising that prospects for human progress in the 21st century are increasingly tied to how people are informed or misinformed, how information is controlled or liberated, and how media institutions remain independent in the face of authoritarian or factional power. It is rooted in a recognition too of just how essential good journalism is to functioning democracies (take your pick from Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Cambridge Analytica and myriad other examples from around the world).

The media support community has been a gloomy place in recent years. The heyday of independent media support was in the 1990s and 2000s when democracy was – or at least appeared to be – sweeping the world. The last two years have been especially depressing with increasingly successful clampdowns by authoritarians, unprecedented numbers of journalists killed or imprisoned, the ever more influential role of misinformation and disinformation in disrupting democratic politics, the growth of propaganda and counter propaganda in the context of violent extremism and a degradation of respect for media freedom, not least in the US.

But it isn’t just the backdrop of world events that has darkened the mood within the media support community. It was the lack of success many traditional efforts had in really bringing into being the kinds of free, plural and professional media systems that we were collectively working to achieve.

If investment in media assistance is to return as an important development priority – and I believe it is vital that it does – then it needs to learn from what has worked and not worked in the past.

In this blog series, published around World Press Freedom Day, I today ask first why media development efforts have not had the kind of impact that their backers and investors had hoped, especially in the fragile states where most international development donors are focusing their support.

In the second I offer some ideas for fresh thinking which I hope might spur broader debate.

In the third I talk about just some of the ways �鶹Լ�� Media Action is approaching these issues and adapting.

In the fourth I talk about how the sector – donors, practitioners and media partners – need to be better connected and strategy much more joined up to deliver the outcomes we want to see.

And in the fifth blog, I argue that the relationship between independent media support and the substantial funding invested in social and behaviour change communication is confused and unnecessarily disconnected.

Where are the successful models of media assistance?

Where can we point to the success stories or models where thriving independent, economically sustainable, credible media organisations and industries have emerged as a result of the media assistance programmes that were put in place in many countries? Why have all those media laws, regulatory bodies and access to information provisions that had been supported to come into being had so little effect on the actual structure, conduct and independence of the media – or indeed people’s access to trustworthy information?

How was it that hundreds of journalists had been trained with often little discernible improvement in the quality of reporting? How could the tech optimism offered by the US West Coast digital giants and the democratic energy of the Arab Uprisings so quickly turn to chaos and information powered factionalism, confusion and hate? How is it that so many national elections – and broader politics - are so vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation when so much effort has gone into media assistance designed to achieve the opposite?

For sure, different media support organisations (including �鶹Լ�� Media Action) point to often extraordinary impact in particular areas and particular sectors – in nurturing independent journalism, in underpinning informed public debate at great scale, at building institutions and structures, in supporting elections underpinned by open and informed public debate, not disinformation and manipulation. I consider most media support organisations highly effective in what they do. But the fact remains that, especially in fragile states, the media is weaker, more co-opted and often less sustainable than for years.

The reasons are complex.

This is mostly to do with the scale of the challenge. The political incentives to control, distort or co-opt information and communication spaces (both traditional and digital) have greatly outgunned the efforts to defend and advance public interest media. I and many others predicted only a few years ago that communicative power was shifting from elites to masses, from institutions to networks and from old to young. In many ways it has – but ultimately communicative power now rests most with those who see political or other advantage in undermining informed public debate and away from those who seek to underpin it.

But ascribing the current situation solely to tectonic power shifts would let us off the hook too easily. Some of our lack of success can be attributed to hubris - a lack of understanding of (or investment in understanding) political realities and a too blind assumption that the new information environments created such a hostile environment for authoritarians that democracy and freedom would inevitably triumph. This arena is a power game and communicative power now favours the authoritarians and the factionalists. Any future agenda that does not recognise and root its response in the political economy realities of 21st Century information and communication environment will fail.

But resources – or the lack of them – have mattered and many would argue that there simply hasn’t been enough money and effort to support independent media. I would agree with this - the National Endowment for Democracy has estimated that approximately two per cent of the funding development donors allocate to improving governance is directed at supporting media (and less than half a percent of total development funding).

But that would be too convenient an explanation and one that prevents us from properly examining what we need to stop doing and what we need do better.

And it isn’t just the lack of funding, it is the organisation that underpins it. Lack of funding can’t disguise the fact that in some countries – such as Afghanistan – huge amounts have been directed at supporting independent media but such efforts have too often been inchoate. Funding in this area has been poorly organised and particularly vulnerable to boom and bust cycles, to faddism (a few years ago if a proposal didn’t include some form of digital app it was unlikely to be supported) and, generally, to poor systems of lesson learning. There are very few spaces to assess what is working and not working in supporting media and the research base underpinning the field is weak, siloed and insufficiently interdisciplinary.

Ultimately, we have to accept that media development could have been far better supported and more organised and it would still have struggled in the face of these odds. That does not mean the situation is hopeless. Public interest journalism has arguably never been better respected and recognised with the Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers and the unsung heroics of independent journalists and citizen journalists around the world never playing a more important role in democracy. The importance of independent public debate has never been more valued in environments where elections are increasingly undermined and manipulated through control of information.

And our capacity to have an evidence and reality based debate is much improved now we can take off the rose tinted spectacles offered by the digital evangelists as public interest journalism has exposed how Cambridge Analytica has allegedly used data to distort the politics of so many countries, including fragile states, around the world.

But what we can’t do in the media development space is simply to repeat the recipes and strategies of the past. We need to understand and confront our own experiences of what has worked and not worked.

That forms the basis of my second blog.

James Deane is Director of Policy and Research at �鶹Լ�� Media Action

The role of the media in a divided society

2016-06-29T10:47:26+00:00

Our director of policy and learning’s personal reflection on the role of media in divided societies in the wake of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union.

I’ve spent many years writing about, researching and supporting media in countries of crisis. I’ve especially focused on divided societies. I’ve argued that the character of the media, the information available to people and the capacity of people to communicate across divides in their countries does much to determine how societies either fragment or unite.

Now my own country finds itself in crisis and I find myself, like millions of my compatriots, confused, concerned and uncertain as to how to navigate the future – for myself, for my family and as a citizen. I remind myself that what we are going through right now is as nothing to the experiences of some of the countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East where �鶹Լ�� Media Action works. I find consolation and inspiration that many of those countries have found ways of rebuilding themselves after immensely more traumatic experiences of war and despite ongoing poverty. The UK is in a very different position but, for all the privilege we have as a country, there is real a sense of dislocation among many of us, a deep-seated uncertainty about who we are as a country, our place in the world and especially about one or our most prized sources of self-identity – our tolerance.

But if I ever had doubts that the role of a media in a country in crisis is somehow unimportant or marginal or that I might have made a mistake spending years trying to support media systems that enable informed citizenries, that allow economically and politically marginalised voices to be heard and that create the platforms for public debate that enable people to understand each other – those doubts have been expelled.

I am not going to diagnose or critique different British media organisations here, nor enter the much-traversed territory of the rights and wrongs of the Brexit outcome. Some will argue parts of the news media have voiced and reflected the anger and dispossession of millions of British citizens who have felt ignored and marginalised from the political, social and economic mainstream of this country in recent decades. Others will claim that they have fuelled tension and blame in society and distorted the information available to their readers. Some will argue that the fact that one of the commonest Google UK search terms on the Friday after the Brexit vote was “What is the EU?” provides an abject example of a collective media failure to inform its citizenry before the biggest political decision of a lifetime. Others will point to one of the most vibrant, if difficult and bad tempered, political campaigns in our history muscularly played out through a free, diverse and noisy cauldron of democratic debate.

But I come away convinced more than ever of three things.

The first is that media matters when divided countries go through a political crisis. In the jargon of the development world, the idea that media are unimportant in shaping governance outcomes is an indefensible proposition. The fact that so little development attention is paid to supporting independent, democratic media capable of informing public debate in divided societies seems ever odder in the 21st century information age.

The second is that I have never been more proud to work for an organisation linked to the �鶹Լ�� especially since the referendum vote. There will no doubt be post-mortems and research theses in the future examining the performance of our public service broadcaster during this national trauma. But in my view, the crisis has demonstrated as never before (at least in my lifetime) the importance of a genuinely independent national broadcaster that exists to serve the public with factual information and provides a trusted platform for public debate for a country that has rarely seemed more divided and at odds with itself.

Finally, I have never before been more convinced of the value of what �鶹Լ�� Media Action does around the world. Britain’s international reputation and standing in the world has clearly been seriously affected over the last week, but what my organisation stands for – trusted information, balanced and informed debate, reflecting the perspectives of all in society – seems ever more relevant to the challenges facing divided societies in crisis.

I now know just a little more about what it means to live in one.

James Deane is Director of Policy and Learning at �鶹Լ�� Media Action.

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