"Narratives about Africa are often shaped by deficit discourses that frame “development” as an instrument for advancing the interests of global capitalism. From within this neoliberal view, Africa has to “catch up” to and “be taught” how to emulate and achieve the standards promulgated i
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n mainstream media. Through the lens of an alternative realism, however, such narratives can be reshaped. The African philosophy of ubuntu is one example of a deeply relational ethic from within which development can be reconceptualized as “freedom” in terms of democratic ideals and which can be used as a guiding principle for media work and the refashioning of (reality television) images." (Abstract)
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"In 2018 the fictional country Wakanda from the film Black Panther was the fourth most mentioned African country on Twitter, after Egypt, South Africa and Kenya. The fact that Africa’s 4th most talked about country doesn’t exist tells us two things: pop culture is a powerful tool for narrative w
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ork and we need to do more to make Africa’s 51 remaining real countries more compelling. This data point was unearthed during a literature review to understand what insights already exist about narrative in Africa in the media. The review was part of our mission to unpack narrative and give some real substance to that well used phrase “we need to change the African narrative!’ We analysed 56 documents of literature (post 2000) including research reports, books, chapters, and academic journal articles [...] So, what did we find? A few surprising facts like the one about Wakanda, but admittedly nothing we didn’t already suspect. Things you need to know Western narratives about Africa in the media are around two narrative strands, i.e. Afro-pessimistic and Afro-optimistic. The main themes we found were: Poverty is rife, how this narrative has shifted the most however, is with a rise in business reporting; African leaders are depicted as poor leaders, who exercise weak governance, leading to failing or failed states; Incomprehensible violence is prevalent; Africa is rife with diseases, especially HIV/AIDS and Ebola; Africa is mostly a place of wildlife and nature, but this is being rapidly eroded by urbanisation and poaching ..." (Executive summary)
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"Proposal 1: Bring democracy support and protection to the core of EU external action and implement this strategic priority in EU foreign relations with Africa (and worldwide). Proposal 2: Develop a new narrative and more strategic approach to democracy support in a geopolitical context where democr
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acy is increasingly being undermined from within in (former) democratic countries and challenged from the outside by powerful authoritarian regimes. Proposal 3: Address the impacts of demographic change, urbanisation, digitalisation and climate change on political regimes through EU democracy support. Proposal 4: Invest more in intermediary organisations (media, parties, CSOs, trade unions, business councils) and in the democratic accountability of sectoral policies. Proposal 5: Intensify support for civic education and launch new initiatives to strengthen transnational relations between African and European societies. Proposal 6: Engage more strategically in contexts where authoritarian regimes suddenly open up or where electoral autocracies gradually close political spaces. Proposal 7: Continue and deepen cooperation with African regional organisations and put more emphasis on joint learning and practices for defending democracy. Proposal 8: Create a different institutional set-up that allows the EU to engage more strategically in democratic reforms. Proposal 9: Increase the capacities of the European External Action Service (EEAS) and the Directorate-General for International Cooperation and Development (DEVCO) to work on democracy support. Proposal 10: Develop a joint European approach towards democracy support that is sustained by all European countries." (Executive summary)
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"DW Akademie collects and documents the impacts of its projects through a range of methods. There are three approaches that are currently standard in development cooperation: Applied studies, which enable new insights on impacts, impact-oriented monitoring performed with local partners in the course
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of project work, and evaluations prepared by external experts. The present volume focuses on additional methods for presenting impacts: reports from 13 different countries and quantitative data, so-called aggregated impact data, which are reg-ularly collected and bundled. Aggregated impact data sets provide a numerical overview of the people who have been reached through the work of DW Akademie. In 2018, for example, 9.6 million people in rural areas were provided with relevant information with the support of DW Akademie. 26.6 million people have benefited from the restructuring of their state broadcasters and now receive more diverse and attractive reporting. In this publication you will get to know some of the people behind these figures. Their stories are not representative of the totality of the supported target groups but they show which approaches and solutions have worked for individual people and why." (Introduction)
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"This original new book researches into the praxis of this democracy and its media, delving into Ghana's evolvement, media practice, leadership aspirations, pressure group politics and ethnic and tribal cleavages. Written in accessible language it will provide valuable source material for readers in
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terested in the development of a democratic culture. A rich data source for students, scholars and researchers on both the African continent and in the diaspora, it examines the growing influence of social media in political discourse and provides an insightful analysis on debates surrounding political communication and its implications for strengthening democratic culture. Its intention is to challenge the intellectual rigour of scholars, academics, researchers and students. The analytical frames it offers are to generate intellectual discourses. Provides an overview of the history of the press in Ghana and how that has shaped the current media landscape, and draws attention to the growing influence of social media in political messages and debate. The historical analysis of the political situation of Ghana and its relationship to the press is informative, comprehensive and stimulating to read. Ideas discussed are revealing and relevant to current discussions on the contributions of the media to the growth and development of democracy in Ghana in particular - and in Africa as a whole. The unusual and highly original comparative analytic approach used here is in dealing with the media-democracy paradox through comments and analysis that challenges the orthodoxy of western idealism. The discussion of media and democracy, with private and state media operating side-by-side in a multiparty democratic setting regulated by a constitution, adds significantly to the wider field of knowledge on the media and democracy." (Publisher description)
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"The promulgation of the Broadcasting Service Act (BSA), which contains a three-tier model of the broadcasting system, was supposed to revolutionise the broadcasting media sphere in Zimbabwe. It was supposed to change the dynamics of radio broadcasting in Zimbabwe by increasing the opportunity for p
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ublic, commercial and community broadcasting sectors. However, the three-tier model of broadcasting has remained on the paper, creating a strong debate on community radio licensing among media activists, practitioners, academics, the government and other media policy stakeholders on the government’s reluctance in issuing community radio licences. While some studies have focused on the strategies used by community broadcasting activists to communicate with their target audiences in Zimbabwe, this research seeks to contribute to the growing body of literature on community broadcasting policy and the contestations which have resulted in the impasse of the licensing of community radios in Zimbabwe. Based on the Four Theoretical Approach to Community Media, in-depth interviews with Zimbabwean media policy stakeholders as well as documentary analysis, this study explores the contestation of ideas that characterised community broadcasting reform processes in Zimbabwe." (Abstract)
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"This article adopts the case study research approach through the use of document analysis and interviews to investigate the role of two community radio stations in selected areas of the KwaZulu-Natal Province of South Africa with regard to rural development and the dissemination of information to w
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omen listeners. It also suggests ways by which these radios may be used to enhance access to information by rural women in South Africa. The findings reveal that although community radio stations are recognised as support systems for information dissemination in rural communities, their role in information dissemination and the community development of women has not been fully explored. This article suggests ways in which the services of community radios may be enhanced by the provision of information to women for rural development." (Abstract)
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"In the last decade, the Chinese media have imposed themselves in the global arena and have started to become a reference point, in business and cultural terms, for other national media systems. This book explores how the global media landscape was changed by this revolutionary trend, and why and ho
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w China is now playing a key role in guiding it. It is, on the one hand, a book on how the Chinese media system continues to take inspiration and to be shaped (or remapped) by American, European and Asian media companies, and, on the other, a volume on the ways in which recent Chinese media’s “going out” strategy is remapping the global media landscape. Organised into two sections, this book has eight chapters written by American, Chinese and European scholars. Focusing on different markets (such as the movie industry, the press, broadcasting, and the Internet), different regions and different actors (from Donald Trump to the Tanzania-Zambia Railway to journalists), this book provides a fresh interpretation on the main changes China has brought to the global media landscape." (Publisher description)
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"This paper examines digital mobilisation with respect to knowledge production, legitimacy and power in Sudan since new communication and surveillance technologies became widespread. Enthusiasm for digital opposition peaked with the Arab Spring and troughed through the repressive government apparatu
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s. Social media (SMS, Facebook, Twitter) and crowdsourcing technologies can threaten the government’s control over the public sphere as participatory practices. To arrive at this finding, we argue the significance of epistemological tools of those who control the representation of digital power, and approach state legitimacy as an ongoing and fragile process of constructing “reality” that requires continuous work to stabilise and uphold. At the same time, the paper describes an international counterpublic of security researchers and hackers who revealed that the Sudanese government invested greatly in controlling the digital landscape. We analyse Nafeer, a local grass-roots initiative for flood-disaster-relief that made use of digital media despite the digital suppression. Nafeer’s challenge to the state came from the way it threatened the state-monopoly over knowledge, revealing both the fragility and the power of state legitimacy." (Abtsract)
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"The most extreme damage inflicted by social media can be seen in South Sudan. As documented in the chapter by Theo Dolan, social media in South Sudan has contributed to hatred and conflict among ethnic groups. Many investigators, including UN investigators, have warned that South Sudan's social med
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ia are triggering violence against ethnic groups. Since the beginning of the civil war in late 2013, social media has fuelled waves of hate speech that have provoked deadly violence and ethnic conflict in South Sudan, including massacres and other atrocities. In that sense, social media has become a new variation of the "hate radio" phenomenon that flourished in Rwanda before and during the 1994 genocide … Social media is also emerging as a powerful way to harass and intimidate the opponents of a regime or a political party. In this sense, it adds another weapon to the arsenal of a powerful regime that already has multiple weapons at its disposal. A regime can mobilize its supporters to use social media in a targeted way against its foes, or it can use its financial resources to create a fake army of fictional users on social media. In either case, it is tilting the playing field against its enemies. A targeted attack through social media can be more effective than the telephone threats or messages often deployed in the past. The use of social media can be more intimidating because it belittles the targeted person in front of a much bigger audience. The presence of this audience means that the attack is more damaging, more difficult to ignore and has the potential to mobilize large numbers of people against the victim … While social media is often used for anti-democratic purposes in Africa's authoritarian states, it has also been used as a force for reform, accountability and justice. It has helped to safeguard the fairness of elections. It has allowed greater scrutiny of potential threats, such as vote-rigging or violence, allowing citizens to be alerted when there is still a chance to prevent the worst abuses. It has put a spotlight on corruption and political wrongdoing, allowing activists to mobilize pressure on governments to resolve these long-neglected problems. In some cases, as it did in the Arab Spring, social media has played a role in toppling an authoritarian state. When an election was called in the small West African state of Gambia, where the dictator Yahya Jammeh had ruled for 22 years, opposition candidates had little access to state-controlled media. So the main opposition party created more than a dozen WhatsApp groups, allowing it to communicate with voters. Other forms of social media also proliferated. A leading independent group, the Gambia Youth and Women's Forum, discussed election issues on a public Facebook group with 55,000 members. The government blocked access to WhatsApp and eventually extended the shutdown to the entire internet, but Gambians used virtual private network (VPN) technology to bypass the shutdown. The opposition won the election and Jammeh was forced to flee the country." (Pages 419-423)
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"Propaganda in the Information Age is a collaborative volume which updates Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model for the twenty-first-century media landscape and makes the case for the continuing relevance of their original ideas. It includes an exclusive interview with Noam Chomsky himself. 2018
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marks 30 years since the publication of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s ground-breaking book Manufacturing Consent, which lifted the veil over how the mass media operate. The book’s model presented five filters which all potentially newsworthy events must pass through before they reach our TV screens, smartphones or newspapers. In Propaganda in the Information Age, many of the world’s leading media scholars, analysts and journalists use this model to explore the modern media world, covering some of the most pressing contemporary topics such as fake news, Cambridge Analytica, the Syrian Civil War and Russiagate. The collection also acknowledges that in an increasingly globalized world, our media is increasingly globalized as well, with chapters exploring both Indian and African media." (Publisher description)
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