Media Matters: Perspectives on Advancing Governance and Development from the Global Forum for Media Development

This 224-page document - the product of a year-long collaboration among media development practitioners and social, political and communications scientists - attempts to present the breadth and depth of the media development sector and includes messages to policy makers on the central role of independent media in effective international development. This resource has four key aims:

1. To help development policy makers and practitioners understand the relevance of independent media systems to their wider goals;
2. To highlight work on the evidence of the relationship between media, communications and the development agenda;
3. To flag key global and regional trends and opportunities in media assistance;
4. To map the media assistance sector, its growing body of literature, and the emerging international research partnerships that will help define its priorities to 2015.

The document's Forward sets forth the role of media as a vital part of the "connective tissue" of democracy. The media, according to this document, can function as a platform for debate, a locus of mediation of conflict, and vehicle for popular participation in governance. "Media Matters" attempts to document the positive impact of healthy media systems and to lay groundwork for the conditions for an independent media that remains autonomous from government and corporate influence and is increasingly relevant to citizen sector audiences.

The document sends 5 key messages to policy makers:

1. Though media and press freedom are now part of governance monitoring frameworks, media support needs to be mainstreamed far more effectively across both policy and practice, especially regarding development agency engagement.
2. Research on the impact of media and communications on the economically poor needs to be strengthened because there is empirical evidence demonstrating its positive impact in reaching the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
3. When independent media systems are inclusive and responsive to diversity, they play a key role in preventing the exclusion of voices that breed extremism. Therefore, policy makers should increase support for media assistance programmes to widen access for moderate voices and balanced discourse and engage donors in media development in countries affected by extremism.
4. Deficits in local media coverage of the external driving forces of change on economically poor countries - e.g., international trade, climate change and global health - can be tackled through concerted media and communications strategies that include assisting developing country journalists to cover processes such as the next phase of the Kyoto Protocol.
5. Development agencies need to engage with the global media assistance community with more urgency through established strategies such as support to media policy and legislation, the development of journalism associations, the provision of affordable capital, professional training, and the capacity-building of indigenous media assistance organisations.

Contributions to this resource are organised in four sections:

• Why Media Matters: Global Perspectives elaborates media contributions to the development of democracy and to an inclusive public sphere; the failure of the public sphere in terms of voice and representation on gender; a new accountability agenda for how media relates to the governance and accountability agenda in international development; and how the networked information economy is creating a new wave of egalitarianism that, according to this author, - underpinned by adequate investment and a pro-economically poor policy framework - holds promise for social and political development.
• How Media Matters: Measuring its Impact discusses the use of empirical evidence to support claims of the impact of media involvement in development, including key areas affecting the MDGs that need to be mainstreamed into international policy; and what indexing initiatives and best practice monitoring and evaluation are currently being proposed.
• Challenges in Media Matters: Practitioner Experiences is organised as a cross cutting of issues, e.g., enabling media environments, media democratisation, representation and press freedom, media assistance in challenging environments, affordable capital, and tackling global issues.
  
  It includes a profile of the media assistance landscapes by global region in reports commissioned for the document to demonstrate regional diversity, including, for example, uneven levels of press freedoms, and resulting in these key shared trends:
  • Media independence is being undermined by a potent combination of economic and legislative measures.
  • Low pay for journalists, low professional standards, and insufficient resources for investigative coverage are pervasive.
  • The rise of new media is corroding the economic models and dynamics of established media.
  • Local media and local political and cultural systems are running behind satellite media.
  • There exists a body of evidence about effective media assistance work across all five regions.
• Mapping the Sector: Literature, Surveys & Resources discusses a history of research projects that survey the work of media for development beginning with the early Media Missionaries(Ellen Hume, 2004) - which was the first attempt to create a narrative history and current overview of the entire field, from an American perspective, with some analysis of Western efforts to promote independent media around the world - and the complementary survey Non-U.S. Funders of Media Assistance Projects. It attempts an inclusive list of more recent research and publications, some country- or region-specific, and some by categories, for example, media and conflict and economics and media development.

In conclusion, this work attempts to survey the current landscape of the role of the independent media in development assistance and its impact on global goals like the MDGs, as well as to clarify key international policy directions for furthering the work of the independent media reporting on development.