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Caught in the Middle: Central and Eastern European Journalism at a Crossroads

Ellen Hume

Washington, DC: Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) (2011), 93 pp.

"Particularly as journalism transitions to new digital, mobile, and Internet formats, Central and Eastern European countries need to experiment with new business and usage models and find strong advocates for independent media. Instead, the current economic, political and social momentum is pushing ... journalists toward sensationalized and partisan tabloid content that does little to earn respect for accountability journalism or engage citizens about important issues. Some nationalistic governments are seeking to co-opt media independence in all of its forms. Some of the best independent journalists are being driven to work for quixotic websites with little audience and no money. Media ownership is a paramount issue in the region, especially in Romania, where five oligarchs hold sway, with little interest in good journalism, and in Latvia, where the one strong daily paper has been sold, after 20 good years, to a politically ambitious local businessman. A pattern has developed in the region: The international media investors such as Rupert Murdoch and Ronald Lauder, who developed the new marketplace for private media after communism fell, are selling out to local entrepreneurs who are interested in harvesting the political potential of these now-established media venues. European Union (EU) accession prompted a flurry of press freedom laws that remain on the books in most of these countries but are not workable without constant vigilance and activism. Organizations like the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, the Latvian Open Society Institute, and the Romanian Center for Independent Journalism are holding their fingers in the dike but are not getting much help from either EU or other Western media developers, who are triaging their aid, moving to the hot zones in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Africa. Public broadcasters, buffeted by political pressure and tabloid competition from private channels, are in a downward spiral, with declining audiences and budgets. Some scholars question their survival, but others hope that digitizing their channels will breathe new life into public media. On the bright side, each country studied has pluralistic media options, and continues to produce investigative journalists of fierce integrity and great skill. Gazeta Wyborcza in Poland remains a strong newspaper and website, with quality journalism and respect throughout the region, even if Polish public television has become a tabloid mess. The Czech Republic still has some effective news organizations and an independent public television news division. Unlike during Communist times, or the still frozen autocracies to the East, journalists in Central and Eastern Europe are able to stay alive and out of jail while uncovering information and publishing it to hold the powerful accountable, even if it is only on a niche website to an elite audience. Such Web-based news organizations, like Latvia’s Ir.lv, the Czech Republic’s Aktuálně.cz, and Hungary’s, www.hirszerzo.hu and oknyomozó.hu, are worth watching. Finally, it is clear that the media developers contributed a lot, and learned a lot, but moved away from Central and Eastern Europe too soon. They should consider new initiatives both regionally and nationally, to support: investigative journalism projects with genuine public importance and ethical boundaries; journalism associations that stress professionalism and counteract the political elites’ dismissal of journalism’s value; media criticism publications that hold journalists, owners, and politicians accountable to the public; media literacy training, as well as a larger curriculum that stresses the rights and obligations of citizens in a democracy." (Executive summary, pages 6-7) more

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Confronting the News: The State of Independent Media in Latin America

Douglas Farah

Washington, DC: Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) (2011), 38 pp.

"Over time the governments of Nicaragua, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador have shown a growing willingness to shrug off even the harshest criticism from usually friendly forums such as the OAS and UNESCO. As the media is forced into silence and the independence of the judiciary is weakened, there are ... more

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Independent Media in Exile
Deep Insights

Bill Ristow

Washington, DC: Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) (2011), 43 pp.

"This report offers four recommendations for addressing some of the complex challenges of independent media in exile: donor groups should expand and formalize coordination of their exile-media support [...]; organizations providing international media training should actively seek to train exile-med ... more

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Social Media in the Arab World: Leading Up to the Uprisings of 2011

Jeffrey Ghannam

Washington, DC: Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) (2011), 39 pp.

"Key Findings: About 17 million people in the Arab region are using Facebook, available in Arabic, with 5 million in Egypt alone, and demand is expected to grow on micro-blogging sites. Twitter announced it will launch its Arabic interface in 2011; Arab governments are developing, at varying rates, ... more

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Covering Corruption: The Difficulties of Trying to Make a Difference

Rosemary Armao

Washington, DC: Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) (2010), 37 pp.

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Cash for Coverage: Bribery of Journalists Around the World

Bill Ristow

Washington, DC: Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) (2010), 33 pp.

"With all the organized efforts to support media development and defend press freedom around the world, there has been remarkably little done in any concerted way to reduce the problem of corrupt journalism", states this report. Ristow proposes that international journalism organizations should issu ... more

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U.S. Universities and Media Development

Anne Nelson

Washington, DC: Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) (2010), 27 pp.

"In July 2010, World Journalism Education Council gathered more than 400 journalism educators from about 50 countries for the second World Journalism Education Congress in South Africa. There was broad recognition that social media has become a major force in the field that cannot be marginalized an ... d that Africa has become a world-class incubator for media innovation. At the August meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Eric Newton carried these ideas a step farther, laying out the “four transformations” for U.S. journalism programs. Journalism schools are: 1. Becoming better connected to other university disciplines and departments, expanding the definition of what it means to be a journalist; 2. Playing an increasing role as content and technology innovators; 3. Emerging as promoters of collaborative, open approaches and models; 4. Becoming news providers that understand the ecosystem of their communities. In the digital age, journalism schools are trying to engage more deeply with the people we used to call the audience. These transformations are even more urgently required in the field of media development. In the future, media development projects will originate in an ever-widening pool of university departments. These will include law, public health, library science, computer science, international relations, visual design, and even architecture and urban planning, where striking advances in mapping applications are taking place. Nonetheless, programs that specialize in data will also require skills from the traditional journalism toolkit: verification, story-telling ability, and contextualization. Academia could be an ideal setting for this exchange of ideas, a meeting place between core values and technological innovation. Universities could also provide a space for frank discussion about the limitations of technology and the means to discern when new technologies offer concrete benefits to the user and when they constitute a distraction. These questions are even more critical in resource-poor societies in the developing world. To achieve these ends, more coordination is needed, both within and among universities, to serve as a critical bridge–between North and South, between technologists and humanists, between social media and traditional journalism." (Conclusion, page 23) more

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U.S. Government Funding for Media Development

Laura Mottaz

Washington, DC: Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) (2010), 11 pp.

The report analyzes spending on media development by the U.S. Department of State and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which budgeted $140.7 million for media development efforts in FY 2010. This figure represents a dramatic increase when compared with the $68.9 million spent only ... more

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Libel Tourism: Silencing the Press Through Transnational Legal Threats

Drew Sullivan

Washington, DC: Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) (2010), 41 pp.

"This report by Drew Sullivan, a journalist, editor, and media development specialist, explains how lawsuits can force media organizations to censor themselves or limit the distribution of their news content, restricting freedom of expression and thus threatening one of the foundations of democracy. ... more

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Winds from the East: How the People’s Republic of China Seeks to Influence the Media in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia

Douglas Farah, Andy Mosher

Washington, DC: Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) (2010), 32 pp.

"The People's Republic of China is seeking to influence the media in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia through a variety of means: direct aid to state-run media in the form of radio transmitters and financing for national satellites; the provision of content and technology to allies and pote ... more

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Broadcasting in UN Blue: The Unexamined Past and Uncertain Future of Peacekeeping Radio
Deep Insights

Bill Orme

Washington, DC: Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) (2010), 73 pp.

"For almost twenty years, United Nations peacekeeping missions have set up local radio stations in conflict-prone countries - 14 to date, seven of which remain in operation. According to this report, some of the fourteen peacekeeping radio stations implemented by the United Nations contributed more ... more

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Shifting Sands: The Impact of Satellite TV on Media in the Arab World

Deborah Horan

Washington, DC: Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) (2010), 30 pp.

"The political landscape of individual countries, including their level of internal legitimacy and perceived vulnerability to political extremists, influences the level of media freedom enjoyed in that country at any given moment. In many MENA countries, media freedom is a privilege bestowed by mona ... more

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Evaluating the Evaluators: Media Freedom Indexes and What They Measure

John Burgess

Washington, DC; Philadelphia: Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA); Annenberg School for Communication, Center for Global Communication Studies (CGCS) (2010), 63 pp.

"The organizations that conduct country rankings should continue to increase technical sophistication, cultural neutrality, and transparency. In particular, continued attention must be paid to digital media, notably the Internet and mobile phones, which now number approximately 4.6 billion worldwide ... more

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The Pentagon, Information Operations, and International Media Development

Peter Cary

Washington, DC: Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) (2010), 43 pp.

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Good, But How Good? Monitoring and Evaluation of Media Assistance Projects

Andy Mosher

Washington, DC: Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) (2009), 26 pp.

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Soft Censorship: How Governments Around the Globe Use Money to Manipulate the Media

Don Podesta

Washington, DC: Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) (2009), 29 pp.

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One Size Does Not Fit All: Objectives and Priority Areas for Media Assistance in Different Societies
Deep Insights

Krishna Kumar

Washington, DC: Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) (2009), 39 pp.

"The essential thesis of this paper is that the requirements and problems of the media sector differ substantially from country to country according to its political, social and economic conditions: in authoritarian states the scope and intensity of media assistance is quite limited, whereas democra ... more

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Throwing the Switch: Challenges in the Conversion to Digital Broadcasting

John Burgess

Washington, DC: Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) (2009), 34 pp.

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Challenges to U.S. Government Support for Media Development

Andrew Green

Washington, DC: Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) (2009), 22 pp.

"Media play a pivotal role in U.S. foreign policy, but the two U.S. government bodies most directly involved in media development assistance - the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) - face significant resour ... more

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The Role of New Media in the 2009 Iranian Elections

Washington, DC: Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) (2009), 7 pp.

Independent Media in Exile Deep Insights

Broadcasting in UN Blue: The Unexamined Past and Uncertain Future of Peacekeeping Radio Deep Insights

One Size Does Not Fit All: Objectives and Priority Areas for Media Assistance in Different Societies Deep Insights

Independent Media in Exile
Deep Insights

Broadcasting in UN Blue: The Unexamined Past and Uncertain Future of Peacekeeping Radio
Deep Insights

One Size Does Not Fit All: Objectives and Priority Areas for Media Assistance in Different Societies
Deep Insights