"China’s biggest media conglomerate, Xinhua, has 37 bureaus in Africa. This dwarves any other news agency—African or non-African—and is a dramatic increase from just a handful two decades ago. Another Chinese media giant, StarTimes, is China’s biggest player in African digital TV and the sec
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ond largest in Africa after South Africa’s DSTV. StarTimes is installing satellite dishes in 10,000 rural homes across 20 African countries, linking them to Chinese digital TV, further embedding itself on the continent.
Many of Africa’s young journalists are trained in China and paid by Chinese media entities. In Kenya alone, 500 journalists and local staff are employed by Chinese media agencies, dispatching 1,800 news items monthly. Veteran China-trained Kenyan journalist Joseph Odindo, the former editorial director of Nation Media Group (East and Central Africa’s largest media conglomerate), notes that he had to keep close watch on his workforce while at the Standard Group. “[W]e had to draw up a chart which would enable us to see who was out on a Chinese training at any given time, who was due to come back, and who was next—otherwise you could find half of your newsroom is in Beijing undergoing training.”
The surge in Chinese investments in the African media space is part of a global strategy by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to gain influence in the developing countries by shaping their information environments. The CCP views the media as a battleground for “telling China’s story well,” a phrase coined by CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping in 2013 at the party’s National Propaganda and Ideology Work Conference. China’s ruling party, according to its own policies, regards the media as an arena of combat to advance its narratives and policies and to discredit those of its adversaries without using military force. This invokes the Sun Tzu concept of “winning battles without fighting,” a concept CCP propagandists frequently use to describe their media offensives." (Introduction)
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"Throughout Africa, the right to publish — like political power — has to be grabbed; it cannot be exercised solely on politicians’ goodwill or the strength of a Constitution. Thus, good journalism demands more than an ability to cultivate news sources and generate content. It requires courage.
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In this lies one of the continent’s gravest tragedies — the growing army of talented men and women driven from their homelands for thinking critically and daring to speak out. Their absence may give politicians synthetic comfort, but in reality it leaves their nations intellectually the poorer. Hounded is both a tribute and a record of history. It’s an acknowledgement of the commitment to truth and justice in little-known corners of the continent — the cluttered desk of a lone blogger in Ethiopia, bustling newsroom in Burundi and the dimly-lit studio of a Lagos pirate radio — which has kept the flame of hope burning under the most stifling of political rules. The stories are from 16 jurisdictions, including Madagascar, Chad, Rwanda, Uganda and Togo, and cover different calendar periods." (Page 3)
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"[...] there seems to be an understanding that the media is important and that society needs the media. In October 2018, KAS Media Africa, therefore, gathered the CEOs of media houses, publishers and editors-in-chief from 16 different countries, both from Anglophone and Frenchspeaking Africa, in Acc
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ra. In the Ghanaian capital, they heard about different models of how to make one’s media enterprise economically stronger. Questions such as whether Africa needs or accepts a paywall featured. Along with several other key sustainability issues, the critical question of how the media can make itself more independent from government advertising – often a vital cog in the media’s sustainability in most parts of Africa – was also debated. There is no one-size-fits-all model of a good media enterprise, but we do encourage the exchange between people who realise that making an online publication in Cape Town is completely different from defending one’s publication in Bamako, Mali against government interference and terrorist threats. Some media in Africa will not survive the gathering storms, while others will make it through diversification, innovation, an exchange with other players in the African market, and with the passion of their publishers." (Foreword)
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