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The Index on International Media Freedom Support 2025

Martin Scott, Mel Bunce, Shannon Maguire, Mary Myers

University of East Anglia, Centre for Journalism and Democracy; City St George’s, University of London (2025), 30 pp.

"The Index on International Media Freedom Support (IMFS) evaluates and ranks states based on their support for media freedom beyond their borders. It does this by analysing the contributions that countries have made to international diplomatic, financial and safety / protection initiatives that prom ... ote media freedom. The IMFS Index includes all states that are members of both the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) and the Media Freedom Coalition (MFC) (30 countries). These countries have pledged to promote media freedom internationally, and the IMFS holds them accountable for these commitments. The Index draws on data from the previous calendar year (2024), except for the ODA figures, which are for 2023, due to the time lag in reporting. The IMFS Index is produced by an independent research group and is a joint project between City St George’s, University of London, and the University of East Anglia. The results of the 2025 IMFS Index highlight several well performing states: Lithuania (1st) is the highest ranked country, largely due to its diplomatic efforts, including its leadership of two multilateral initiatives. Sweden (2nd) spent a far higher proportion of its Official Development Assistance (ODA) on media development in 2023 than any other country (0.91%). It is the only country to get close to the benchmark of 1.0%, as recommended by the Forum on Information & Democracy. France (5th) is the only country to award funding to all four qualifying multilateral pooled funds in 2024. Latvia (9th) is the only country to have both an active emergency visa scheme dedicated to supporting journalists at-risk and to support a national initiative that promotes the protection and safety of media workers in exile. The IMFS Index also identifies several less encouraging trends and performances: No country performed consistently well across all three areas of diplomacy, funding and safety / protection. Almost two thirds of the 30 countries qualified for the lowest, bronze category, earning only 10 points or less. This includes four members of the G7: the United Kingdom (equal 12th), the United States (equal 12th), Italy (equal 24th) and Japan (28th). The lowest ranked countries were Japan (28th), Slovenia (equal 29th) and South Korea (equal 29th), due to their relative lack of support for diplomacy, funding and safety / protection. However, South Korea and Japan do provide support for the wider enabling environment for media freedom in their ODA spending, which is not measured by this Index. On average, the 30 states in the IMFS Index allocated just 0.16% of their ODA to media development in 2023. Thirteen countries awarded less than 0.1%, including three – Latvia (9th), Greece (21st), and Slovenia (29th) – which reported giving 0%. Only five countries had an emergency visa scheme for journalists in 2024, and only five hosted an assistance programme for journalists in exile. Twenty-one countries had neither." (Executive summary, pages 3-4) more

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Small world: International factual programming on public service channels (2023-24)

Martin Scott

London: International Broadcasting Trust (IBT) (2025), 19 pp.

"This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the UK’s Public Service Broadcasters (PSBs) in covering global events through current affairs and other factual programmes on television channels. To achieve this, we analysed the volume, originality, scheduling, genre, and geographic focus of inte ... more

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Capturing News, Capturing Democracy: Trump and the Voice of America

Kate Wright, Martin Scott, Melanie Bunce

New York: Oxford University Press (2024), viii, 294 pp.

"How did the Trump administration capture one of the world’s most important public service news networks? This book uses rare interviews and an analysis of private correspondence and internal documents to explain why and how Voice of America (VOA) became intensely politicized from 2020 to 2021. It ... more

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Humanitarian Journalists: Covering Crises from a Boundary Zone

Martin Scott, Kate Wright, Mel Bunce

London; New York: Routledge (2023), xvi, 127 pp.

"Based on a 5-year study, involving over 150 in-depth interviews, this book examines the political, economic and social forces that sustain and influence humanitarian journalists. The authors argue that – by amplifying marginalised voices and providing critical, in-depth explanations of neglected ... more

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Whose Media Freedom is Being Defended? Norm Contestation in International Media Freedom Campaigns

Martin Scott, Mel Bunce, Mary Myers, Maria Carmen Fernandez

Journal of Communication, volume 73, issue 2 (2023), pp. 87-100

"This article analyses how international advocacy campaigns approach and define media freedom, and what influences this process. It does this through a two-year case study of the Media Freedom Coalition—an intergovernmental partnership of over 50 countries—that included 55 interviews with key st ... more

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UK Aid Match: Real Aid or Charity-Washing?

Martin Scott

All-Party Parlimentary Group for Aid Match; University of East Anglia (2023), 32 pp.

"UK Aid Match (UKAM) is a match-funding scheme, funded by the UK government, designed to incentivise greater charitable giving amongst the UK public towards projects that reduce poverty in developing countries. For every £1 donated to a UKAM charity appeal, the government also contributes £1 of UK ... aid – usually up to £2 million. This report examines UKAM’s communication requirements and considers their potential limitations, contradictions, inconsistencies, and political implications. UKAM’s overall aim is to allow the British public to have a say in how UK aid is spent and provide opportunities to engage with international development issues, whilst boosting the impact of civil society projects to reach the poorest people in developing countries8. According to the UKAM documents analysed for this report, all participating Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) are required to comply with various communication requirements, to be eligible for government matchfunding, most notably to use a pro bono communications partnership that can provide at least 400,000 opportunities for the UK public to view information about the appeal and the match funding offer. [...] This report shows that UKAM appeals have generally been very successful in achieving their communications objectives. Since 2011, UKAM appeals have generated over 14 billion unique Opportunities To be Viewed (OTVs) by the UK public. These communications include appeals involving Ministers, Parliamentarians or the Secretary of State receiving over 45 million OTVs in 2019 alone14. In just the February 2020 round of UKAM , the ‘value in kind for pro bono communications’ of the 1.7bn OTVs was given as £2.2 million. However, this report also highlights several concerning contradictions with UKAM’s current communication requirements. For example, setting a minimum requirement for generating ‘Opportunities to View’ (OTV) appears likely to restrict the participation of NGOs with smaller marketing capabilities. This limits the extent to which UKAM can achieve its stated objective – in line with two consecutive Conservative Party Manifesto commitments – to ‘give the public a say in how a portion of the UK aid budget is spent. This report also notes that UKAM funding has only amounted to approximately 0.2% of UK Official Development Assistance (ODA) since 2011, while ODA has been reduced to 0.5% of Gross National Income (GNI)18. Given this, the 14 billion OTVs generated by UKAM may inadvertently give the UK public a misleading impression of the true extent to which they are directing a portion of the UK aid budget to their favoured charities. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that – rather than giving the UK public a greater say in directing UK aid – incentivising campaigns to have greater reach may instead be providing greater reputational benefits to government Ministers – who charities are required to feature in their campaigns." (Executive summary, pages 5-6) more

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The Influence of News Coverage on Humanitarian Aid: The Bureaucrats’ Perspective

Martin Scott, Mel Bunce, Kate Wright

Journalism Studies, volume 23, issue 2 (2022), pp. 167-186

"We examine if and how news coverage influences governments’ humanitarian aid allocations, from the perspective of the senior bureaucrats involved in such decision-making. Using rare in-depth interviews with 30 directors and senior policymakers in 16 of the world’s largest donor countries, we fo ... more

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Reset Required? Evaluating the Media Freedom Coalition After its First Two Years

Mary Myers, Martin Scott, Mel Bunce, Lina Yassin, Maria Carmen Fernandez, Rachel Khan

University of East Anglia (UEA); City University of London; University of the Philippines-Diliman (2022), 69 pp.

"The purpose of this report is to evaluate the Media Freedom Coalition (MFC) in its first two years of operation, from 2019 to 2021. The MFC is a partnership of 50 countries working together to advocate for media freedom and the safety of journalists. Our independent report is based on over 100 inte ... more

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Soft Power, Hard News: How Journalists at State-Funded Transnational Media Legitimize Their Work

Kate Wright, Martin Scott, Mel Bunce

International Journal of Press/Politics, volume 25, issue 4 (2020), pp. 607-631

"How do journalists working for different state-funded international news organizations legitimize their relationship to the governments which support them? In what circumstances might such journalists resist the diplomatic strategies of their funding states? We address these questions through a com ... more

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Shining a Spotlight on Media Freedom? Media Coverage of the Global Campaign for Media Freedom

Martin Scott, Mel Bunce, Mary Myers

City University of London; University of East Anglia (2020), 26 pp.

"The Global Campaign for Media Freedom (GCMF) was launched in 2019 by the UK and Canadian governments. It includes a coalition of 37 countries seeking to promote media freedom, a High Level Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom and a Global Media Defence Fund, administered by UNESCO. The overarch ... more

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Foundation Funding and the Boundaries of Journalism

Martin Scott, Mel Bunce, Kate Wright

Journalism Studies, volume 20, issue 14 (2019), pp. 2034-2052

"Private foundations are an important source of funding for many news outlets. It has even been suggested that they may offer a partial solution to journalism’s economic crisis. Yet we do not know how foundation funding shapes journalistic practice. In this article, we show that foundation funding ... more

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Foundation-Funded Journalism, Philanthrocapitalism and Tainted Donors

Kate Wright, Martin Scott, Mel Bunce

Journalism Studies, volume 20, issue 5 (2019), pp. 675-695

"Not-for-profit news organisations are increasingly funded by private foundations, supported by wealthy entrepreneurs. This raises a range of ethical dilemmas for journalists, which are particularly serious when their donors are alleged to have been involved in unethical or illegal activities. Altho ... more

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Foundation-Funded Journalism: The State of Research. Reading List

Martin Scott, Kate Wright, Mel Bunce

Humanitarian-journalism.net (2019), 6 pp.

"Research into foundation-funded journalism is relatively scarce and disconnected. There is, for example, no single edited volume on this topic. This matters because while philanthropists and foundations often want to support journalism, it is not always clear how they should do this. Similarly, jou ... more

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Humanitarian Journalism

Mel Bunce, Martin Scott, Kate Wright

In: Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Communication

Oxford: Oxford University Press (2019), 22 pp.

"Humanitarian journalism can be defined, very broadly, as the production of factual accounts about crises and issues that affect human welfare. This can be broken down into two broad approaches: “traditional” reporting about humanitarian crises and issues, and advocacy journalism that aims to im ... more

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Attitudes Towards Media Coverage of Humanitarian Issues Within the Aid Sector

Martin Scott

Humanitarian-journalism.net; University of East Anglia (2018), 9 pp.

"There is widespread dissatisfaction within the aid industry with the quantity and quality of mainstream news coverage of humanitarian issues and crises. 73% of respondents agreed that mainstream news media does not produce enough coverage of humanitarian issues. Mainstream news coverage was also re ... more

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The State of Humanitarian Journalism

Martin Scott, Kate Wright, Mel Bunce

Humanitarian-journalism.net; University of East Anglia (2018), 36 pp.

"Very few international news organisations routinely cover humanitarian affairs. Only 12 news outlets reported on all four of the humanitarian events we analysed in 2016. Because of the high costs of producing regular, original journalism on humanitarian issues, commercial news organisations do not ... more

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Foundation Support for International Non-Profit News: Mapping the Funding Landscape

Martin Scott, Kate Wright, Mel Bunce

Humanitarian-journalism.net; University of East Anglia (2018), 11 pp.

"There are three main reasons for the limited amount of foundation support for international journalism: a) It rarely aligns directly with the strategic priorities of a foundation (and so has to compete either with all other forms of journalism, or with numerous other ways of achieving the specific ... more

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The Myth of Representations of Africa: A Comprehensive Scoping Review of the Literature

Martin Scott

Journalism Studies, volume 18, issue 2 (2017), pp. 191-210

"This paper presents the results of a comprehensive scoping review of empirical research into US and UK media representations of Africa published between 1990 and 2014. The results show that existing research has a remarkably narrow focus on a specific number of countries, events, media and texts. R ... more

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Donor Power and the News: The Influence of Foundation Funding on International Public Service Journalism

Martin Scott, Mel Bunce, Kate Wright

International Journal of Press/Politics, volume 22, issue 2 (2017), pp. 163-184

"How does donor funding affect the independence, role perceptions, and ideology of the journalism it supports? We begin to answer this increasingly important but underresearched question with a year-long case study of the humanitarian news organisation IRIN as it transitioned from being funded by th ... more

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Bring Back the Audience: A Discussion of the Lack of Audience Research in the Field of Media Development

Martin Scott, Christoph Dietz

Global Media Journal - German Edition, volume 6, issue 2 (2016), 7 pp.

"This paper strives to highlight the significant lack of audience research in the field of media development and the consequences of this gap – both for project design and policy making – but also for broader efforts to integrate media into governance debates. Whilst this lack of evidence has be ... more