Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Policy Paper Media Under Pressure: The Trouble With Press Freedom In Kenya, George Nyabuga

Graduate School of Media and Communications

Press freedom in Kenya has undergone significant changes over the past few decades. This resulted in a complex and evolving landscape, where the country boasts of a diverse and lively media landscape, with numerous newspapers, television and radio stations, and a growing online presence giving a credible impression of a plurality of perspectives and voices in the media. Further, the 2010 Kenyan Constitution is recognized as one of Africa‘s most progressive in terms of press freedom protections. It calls for an independent regulator – the Media Council of Kenya – to oversee the media and its standards and safeguard journalists‘ …

The State Of Women In The Media: Representation, Coverage And Framing Of Women In East African Media, Aga Khan University, Graduate School Of Media And Communications

Graduate School of Media and Communications

This research examined the representation of women in East African news media organisations and the coverage and framing of women in top East African newspapers, TV and digital platforms. The study is premised on existent literature on the intricate interplay between media framing, coverage dynamics, and the representation of women in newsrooms’ workforce, given the consequential role all these play in shaping public perceptions of gender issues and shifting norms. Through a comprehensive methodology that incorporated content analysis, document analysis and interviews on the responsibilities and assigned roles of women in media organisations, the research presents findings from a content …

The State Of Innovation And Media Viability In East Africa: From Indepth Media House Surveys, Hesbon Hansen Owilla, Rose Kimani, Ann Hollifield, Julia Wegner, Dennis Reineck, Roland Schürhoff

Graduate School of Media and Communications

Media houses globally are grappling with how best to produce quality content while at the same time remaining financially viable in the wake of shrinking revenues, technological disruptions, the emergence of peripheral content creators, competition for advertisement revenues from big tech platforms, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a myriad of other changes in the ecosystem. Despite these challenges, it is in the interest of the public that news media organisations (NMOs) produce quality content and do so in a financially sustainable fashion. Media viability, that is, producing quality journalism in a financially sustainable way, is, therefore, a growing area of focus. …

Media Viability In Uganda, Aga Khan University

Graduate School of Media and Communications

Uganda has diverse legacy media with various newspapers and magazines, a growing broadcast media sector, which as of early 2020 was made up of 40 TV and 199 accredited radio stations. The country also has a fast-growing online media driven by rapid technological developments that have seen greater use of smartphones in the country. The News Media Organisations (NMOs) in Uganda have benefitted from liberalization and privatisation policies that the country adopted in the early 1990s, which freed the airwaves and made private investment in the country’s media less complicated.

Media Viability In Kenya, Aga Khan University

Graduate School of Media and Communications

The media in Kenya mirrors the social, political and legal transformation that has taken place in the last half a century. Since independence, the media have been affected by the government’s oscillation between more authoritarian and more liberal regimes. Over the past two decades, however, the arc has been towards enhancements of freedom of expression, access to information, and economic growth that has supported the nation’s technological development and the viability of national and local news media. The media landscape is diverse and, with one news producing company for every 320,500 people, very competitive. Ownership of the nation’s news media …

Kenyan Media Trends And Predictions, Alex Awiti, Njoki Chege, Hesbon Owilla

Graduate School of Media and Communications

We asked some clever journalists and media practitioners to peer into their crystal balls and tell us what they think the future holds for the Kenyan media.

Our predictions are intended to highlight the views of thought leaders on the key challenges and opportunities in Kenya’s media industry. This report builds upon a deep introspection of 2019 while combining decades of journalistic experience to produce distilled predictions for this year. We interviewed 34 industry leaders who provided us with some forward-looking contributions on their expectations and predictions for Kenya’s media in 2020.

The media industry in Kenya has been struggling …

Of Rattle Snakes And Grapes Of Wrath: Rise, Fall And Rise Of Independent Media In Kenya, Peter Kimani

Graduate School of Media and Communications

The Kenyan case highlights government’s recourse to sophisticated, “silent” but effective process of emasculating the media in spite of the robustness of the constitutional, legal and institutional frames for media behaviour. The author, Peter Kimani, notes further, however, that investments in the technology sector have led to an empowered citizenry and helped to reorganize the way news is sourced and disseminated, particularly through mobile telephony. According to him, “this, it is safe to predict, is the next news frontier, and start-ups and other fringe news portals are likely to problematize power relations between media barons and the state, and provoke …

Democratic Engagement In The Digital Age: Youth, Social Media And Participatory Politics In Kenya, Samuel Kamau

Graduate School of Media and Communications

As the communication world becomes more complex and participatory, social networking sites (SNSs) have emerged as a platform with the potential to invigorate democracy and political engagement. However, the value of SNSs in politics remains contested among researchers. The study reported on in this article was based on a survey of 600 university students, aged between18 and 35, to examine the relationship between social media use and political engagement among the youth in Kenya. The study focused on the extent to which SNSs facilitate consumption of political information and the role of SNSs in influencing political interest, knowledge and behaviour …

How Queensland Newspapers Reported Public Sector Information Reform, Rhonda Breit, Richard Fitzgerald, Shuang Liu, Regan Neal

Graduate School of Media and Communications

This article explores the role of media in Freedom of Information (FOI) policy transfer, using a case study of Queensland’s 2009 FOI reforms. A multi-dimensional analysis was used to discover how newspapers reported changes in Queensland’s public sector information (PSI) policy to identify whether stories on PSI policy were reframed over time. At a quantitative level, the text analytics software Leximancer was used to identify key concepts, issues and trends in 786 relevant articles from national, metropolitan and regional newspapers. At a qualitative level, discourse analysis was used to identify key themes and patterns from the newspaper articles. Both qualitative …

Internationalization As De-Westernization Of The Curriculum: The Case Of Journalism At An Australian University, Rhonda Breit, Levi Obijiofor, Richard Fitzgerald

Graduate School of Media and Communications

Internationalization of the curriculum points to the interdependent and interconnected (globalized) world in which higher education operates. However, while international awareness is crucial to the study of journalism, in practice this often means an Anglo-American curriculum based around Western principles of journalism education and training that are deeply rooted in Western values and traditions. This tendency to privilege Western thought, practice, and values obscures from view other journalism practices and renders Western models of journalism desirable, replicable, and transplantable to any part of the world. This article discusses the engagement of a small group of staff in the process of …

Empowering And Engaging Students In Learning Research Methods, Rhonda Breit, Shaung Liu

Graduate School of Media and Communications

The capacity to conduct research is essential for university graduates to survive and thrive in their future career. However, research methods courses have often been considered by students as "abstract", "uninteresting", and "hard". Thus, motivating students to engage in the process of learning research methods has become a crucial challenge for lecturers. This paper reports a study which incorporates students' prior (international) experiences into learning academic research in order to enhance relatedness, engagement, and a sense of empowerment. The findings indicate that student attitudes to learning research methods are closely related to the level of their engagement in the learning …

News’ Australian Story Of Ethics And Self-Regulation: A Cautionary Tale, Rhonda Breit, Matthew Ricketson

Graduate School of Media and Communications

I know the newsrooms, I know how cultures develop, and I’m hugely confident that there is no improper or unethical behaviour in our newsrooms.

(ABC 2011, 14 July)
This is how News Limited Chairman and Chief Executive John Hartigan publicly defended the ethical culture of News’ Australian operations in the week following News of the World’s (NoW’s) closure. Speaking during an interview on ABC’s 7.30 Report, Hartigan continued in his defence of Rupert Murdoch’s Australian stable, following shock revelations that NoW had hacked into the phone messages of murdered teenager Milly Dowler:

We’re a company of values, like most companies, …

Uniform Defamation Law In Australia: Moving Towards A More 'Reasonable' Privilege, Rhonda Breit

Graduate School of Media and Communications

A new uniform defamation regime now operates in Australia. This article canvasses the Uniform Defamation Laws (UDLs), focusing on the defence of qualified privilege and its capacity to protect mass media publications in the public interest. Drawing on case law and analysis of the key approaches to statutory privilege, the article evaluates the current approach to statutory qualified privilege. Taking account of observations in O'Hara v Sims (2008, 2009) about the operation of qualified privilege, it questions whether the UDL statutory qualified privilege will ultimately censor publications in the public interest and restrict the application of the qualified privilege defence.

Constructing Legal Narratives: Law, Language And The Media, Jane Johnston, Rhonda Breit

Graduate School of Media and Communications

This paper proposes using the theory of narratology to connect legal discourses and processes with the way the media translate the law into news. Focussing on the Australian context, it looks at the choice of language used by media in covering courts, how stories are told and retold within these primarily textual environments, as well as the selection processes used by journalists in covering these rounds. The paper extends the argument for a narratology of courts, to a narratology of court reporting, suggesting fundamental criteria of story, discourse and the interpretative context be examined. It foreshadows the need for a …

Professionalization And Public Relations: An Ethical Mismatch, Rhonda Breit, Kristin Demetrious

Graduate School of Media and Communications

This paper explores the ethical culture in which contemporary public relations practitioners’ work and how it relates to the professionalisation of the domain. Focusing on the international umbrella public relations institution Global Alliance (GA) and other important industry bodies such as the Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA) and Public Relations Institute of New Zealand (PRINZ), we study how the ‘work’ of a public relations practitioner is described, and as a corollary, what professional and ethical standards are promoted. Our analysis draws on theories of professions (Abbott 1988; Anderson and Schudson 2009; Volti 2008) and narrative (Surma 2004, Herman 2009), …

How The Law Defines Journalism, Rhonda Breit

Graduate School of Media and Communications

Studies proffering critiques of journalism and developing theories that seek to explain what it is have been dominated by research into journalists 'attitudes, social structures and cultural influences and effects. Thus these studies are essentially linear and intra-professional. This paper calls for a broader examination of understandings of journalism based on Abbott’s concept of occupational jurisdiction. Abbott (1988, J993, p. 204) argues that professions cannot be studied individually, but should be examined in the context of an interacting system of professionals; that a theory of professions must take account of culture and social structure as well as intra-, inter- and …

Journalistic Self-Regulation In Australia: Is It Ready For The Information Society?, Rhonda Breit

Graduate School of Media and Communications

This article examines the system of journalistic accountability in Australia, evaluating its capacity to promote `the highest ethical and professional standards' seen as fundamental to achieving the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) vision for an inclusive information society. First, it outlines the approach to media and journalistic accountability adopted in Australia. It then analyses a representative sample of journalism codes of ethics and codes of practice, classifying them according to their approaches to self-regulation, the key characteristics of the codes and the approaches to dispute resolution adopted. The findings of this analysis are then compared with best practice …

Towards A Theory Of Journalism As Practice, Rhonda Breit

Graduate School of Media and Communications

The State of the news media survey 2004 has found that journalists in the United States believe "business pressures are making the news they produce thinner and shallower" (Kovach, Rosenstiel & Mitchell, 2004, p. 1). In fact, Kovach et al (2004, p.2) state that an increasing number of journalists identify economics as their greatest concern, with 66 per cent 0/national journalists and 57 per cent of local journalists surveyed believing "increased bottom-line pressure is seriously hurting the quality of news coverage ", This paper seeks to provide a theoretical framework which explains this dilemma. The theory articulated challenges views 0/ …

Ethics In Journalism And Cheryl Kernot: A Colloquium, Rhonda Breit, John Harrison, Martin Hirst, Trina Mclellan, Desley Bartlett

Graduate School of Media and Communications

Ethics asks the 'ought' question. Ought Laurie Oakes have disclosed Cheryl Kernot's affair with Gareth Evans? Ought the affair be taken into account in any assessment of Kernot's motives for defecting to the ALP? Ought Kernot have disclosed the affair to ALP leaders before her defection? Ought Kernot have omitted the affair from her memoir? Ought politicians' private lives be paraded in public? Ought journalists re-consider their treatment of high-profile women in public life? All these issues and more are discussed in the colloquium below.

Hyperlinks, Frames And Metatags: Some Legal Problems, Rhonda Breit

Graduate School of Media and Communications

No abstract provided.

Chakravarti V Advertiser Newspapers: Lessons For Journalists, Rhonda Breit

Graduate School of Media and Communications

The lower courts are now interpreting the High Court's judgement in Chakravarti v Advertiser Newspaper Ltd, which was handed down in May 1998. As the lower courts grapple with the decision, journalists must still produce reports of complex legal matters. Unfortunately for Australian journalists, the Chakravarti decision has done little to clarify the uncertainty surrounding defamation law. In fact, the decision can be criticised for increasing that uncertainty. This article examines the effect of the Chakravarti case on journalism by analysing the text of the various judgements and: extracting the legal principles which bind journalist; identifying areas where the persuasive …