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Declining public support for media freedom in Af...
By Jeff Conroy-Krutz & Josephine Appiah-Nyamekye Sanny Media liberalization and the emergence of independent media outlets in many African countries over the past few decades has played a central role in democratization. Take, for example, the case of Senegal. Just thirty years ago, there was ju... |
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Putting machine learning to work to measure medi...
By Samhir Vasdev Quality, fact-based news—and trust between citizens and journalists—is essential to helping people make informed decisions about important issues. But traditional methods to evaluate media content are resource-intensive and time-consuming. Pilot research by IREX suggests that, w... |
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Fish, Water, and Global Media: Why Students Need...
“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods and them and says, “Good morning boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit and then eventually one looks over at the other and goes, “What the [&hell... |
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Open Internet Principles for Democracy: Putting ...
Last year the editor of Abia Facts Newspaper, a small, local news platform in Nigeria was arrested at his home on charges of blackmail and criminal defamation. According to the state security officers who detained him, his crime was the reporting he had done on a local politician. More startling, ho... |
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Measuring the link between the Media and Democra...
Elizabeth Stein is a political scientist and inaugural Mark Helmke Postdoctoral Scholar on Global Media, Development and Democracy, which is sponsored by Indiana University’s School of Global and International Studies and the Center for International Media Assistance. The following is a lightl... |
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Media Freedom in the New Burma: Defamation, Self...
By David Angeles With last November’s landslide election victory of Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, the outlook for a successful democratic transition in Burma, also known as Myanmar, seems more positive than ever. Arguably, it was the initial opening of the medi... |
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The Press at the Forefront of Democracy in Liber...
By Dave Peterson The Press Union of Liberia (PUL) has fought for press freedom in Africa as long or longer than just about any other civil society organization on the continent. Founded in 1964, it claims a membership of more than 500 journalists. Abdullai Kamara, the PUL’s president for the past ... |
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Online Comments Sections: Finding the Balance to...
Michael Gioia The comment sections of online newspapers have often become an object of derision, earning a reputation as a magnet for trolls and crazies. But the occasional profane or otherwise objectionable comment has proved to be a surprisingly complex issue for newspapers, which struggle to find... |
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To give democracy a fighting chance, get serious...
Today is International Democracy Day: Thoughts on media’s role in democratic institutions We’ve known for a long time that independent news media is a crucial ingredient in the mix of policies, institutions and political behaviors that make democracy work. And we’ve seen concrete ... |
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Journal of Democracy 25 Years In: An Interview w...
Taking the Temperature of Democracy “When we started, it was a time when, suddenly, democracy was moving to the center of public consciousness,” Marc Plattner, the co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, says. “There was not a wide literature on democracy in developing countries.” Plattner, a... |