Media Action Insight Blog Feed

Time to unite in support of independent media

2023-03-28T09:36:31+00:00

Just over a year on from the first Summit for Democracy, the backdrop for this year’s event – co-hosted by the United States, the Netherlands, South Korea and Zambia – is both very different, and depressingly similar.

It is entirely different in that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has prompted concerted and deep seated effort among democracies committed to showing common cause with extraordinary Ukrainian resistance against autocratic invasion. As recently as 18 months ago, these same countries were still fractured and quarrelsome over issues as diverse as procurement of submarines and COVID vaccines. Today, and with some exceptions, they are mobilising with a fresh shared purpose in defence of the democratic idea, and in resistance to a country where control of ideas has become a defining and depressing mission.

But the backdrop to this Summit is also all too familiar in that most indicators suggest democracy as an idea remains in retreat. Autocracy as a force for organising societies in the interests of unaccountable power remains on the march. The latest V-Dem report on the state of democracy in the world makes for gloomy reading, reporting a new record of 42 autocratising countries - up by nine from the 33 reported in last year’s Democracy Report, which was itself then a historical record. For the first time in more than two decades, the world has more closed autocracies than liberal democracies.

A constant theme

There are other similarities. Attacks on independent media - the strategy used by autocrats to seize and control power – have become a constant theme in any analysis of democratic decline in recent years.

“Aspects of freedom of expression and the media are the ones ‘wanna-be dictators’ attack the most and often first,” finds V-Dem. “At the very top of the list, we find government censorship of the media, which is worsening in 47 countries.”

Autocracy is at risk of becoming a global norm and the route to its advance follows a clear, predictable and demonstrably very successful strategy: first and foremost, intimidate and co-opt the media, and second, deploy disinformation to polarise and divide society. “Autocratising governments are those that are increasing their use of disinformation the most,” finds the report. “They use it to steer citizens’ preferences, cause further divisions, and strengthen their support.”

A press conference in Ukraine

Signs of collective response

There are some signs that democracies are just beginning to recognise this and to respond collectively and determinedly, beyond the many fragmented initiatives which have characterised democracy support in recent years. One of the principal outcomes of the first Summit for Democracy was US President Joe Biden’s leadership in being the first country to commit substantial resources – up to $30 million – to a newly established International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM).

Other heads of state committing resources included then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand and President Emmanuel Macron of France; countries as diverse as Taiwan, South Korea and Switzerland have also pledged their support. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres had earlier voiced his support for the Fund’s establishment.

IFPIM, originally suggested by BBC Media Action, is now an independent entity that has raised almost $50 million and is being established in Paris, with a board co-chaired by Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa and former head of the BBC and the New York Times, Mark Thompson. In addition to a promising and significant source of new finance for independent media in low- and middle-income countries, IFPIM is positioning itself as a symbol of multilateral cooperation in defence of democracy. With support and representation from a broad range of countries, it aims to move beyond the idea that democratic defence is a preserve of the “West” – that, rather, democracy is a universal value and some of its greatest advocates can be found where upholding it is often most challenging.

A slow financial response

All that being said, autocrats still have it depressingly easy and the financial response required to protect independent media around the world is still being mounted by just a very small number – principally the US, Sweden, Switzerland and now France. Several are actually reducing their support. Total support as reported to the OECD stands at just 0.3% of development assistance; miniscule amounts of that support actually finds its way into the coffers of independent media who are under increasingly existential economic, as well as political, pressure.

The COVID pandemic made the autocratic task of undermining media easier still, as already crumbling business models further undermined the resilience of independent media. “In low- and middle-income countries, where many outlets operate in an unstable business environment and have limited access to investment capital, philanthropy and government support, the pandemic threatens the fundamental existence of free, fair, independent news media ecosystem,” found a major 2022 report published by UNESCO and the Economist Intelligence Unit.

BBC Media Action is proud of the role it has played in helping to seed IFPIM, which is now entirely independent, and of other work to support independent media around the world. This has included, for example, facilitating the creation of a National Action Plan on independent media in Sierra Leone, and advising the Indonesian government on a new Presidential Regulation for Publishers’ Rights, ensuring media outlets are paid by the digital platforms and aggregators that carry their content.

An existential financial threat

But efforts like these, and those of other media support responses, cannot succeed unless there is a clear recognition of the existential financial threat that most independent media face. For that to happen, many more countries need to step up their currently negligible contributions to media support. Given the small sums involved, and the immense contributions of independent media to defending democracy and resisting autocracy, these are some of the best value-for-money investments possible.

A similar tide needs to turn on disinformation and toxic polarisation. BBC Media Action is playing a key role here, too.

V-Dem has recommended that, to counter autocratisation, “pro-democratic actors could pursue strategies such as dialogues and civic education seeking to reduce political polarisation and to increase citizens’ resistance to the spread of disinformation.” We work at scale, providing support to more than 250 media partners worldwide to effectively disseminate trustworthy information while scrutinizing and exposing propaganda and disinformation. Last year, we reached over 120 million people with programming designed to encourage debate, dialogue and access to trusted information across divides. We are currently conducting research to gain insight into the factors that influence people's beliefs and their tendency to share information with others. In partnership with the University of Cambridge, we are working to support the creation of content that can scale up the application of ‘inoculation theory’ as a pre-bunking approach to build people’s resilience to mis- and disinformation theory to help prevent the spread of false or hate-filled narratives and news.

Glimmers of light

The tide may look like it is going out on democracy. But there are glimmers of light emerging, and not just with resistance to Russia. Many of the trends V-Dem highlights can work in reverse. It argues that while “disinformation is like a stick used by anti-pluralist parties to stir up polarisation,” the opposite also holds true: as democratisation takes hold, governments find it ever more difficult to spread disinformation.

If democracies all over the world can continue to find common cause, to work together rather than at odds with one another, to establish new multilateral institutions like IFPIM and take maximum advantage of innovation in combatting disinformation, the autocratic wave can be reversed. But there is a long way to go before that becomes reality.

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James Deane is Head of Policy at BBC Media Action. He has spent much of the last three years working with others to develop the International Fund for Public Interest Media.

A journey towards viable and trusted public interest media in Sierra Leone

2022-05-06T10:32:55+00:00

Sierra Leone’s media landscape has grown significantly since the end of the civil war in 2002. By 2021, there were over 500 registered media outlets, including newspapers and magazines, radio, television and direct to home services, according to the country’s media regulator, the Independent Media Commission (IMC).

This growth has been seen as a positive step toward media pluralism. But that is without taking into account the economic viability, independence, and subsequent ability to produce trusted public interest content. In fact, over half of Sierra Leone’s registered media outlets are either not operational at all, or are frequently off-air or out of circulation.

In such an environment, they cannot fulfil the critical role of media in the public interest – sharing trusted information, providing space for dialogue and debate, and holding leaders to account.

Economic implications for media

These deep-seated challenges of the media reflect the economy of Sierra Leone more broadly. Sierra Leone has low gross domestic product (GDP), a growing, but largely unproductive public sector dominated by patron-client politics, and is driven largely by subsistence informal economy. These socio-economic and political features also have implications for media’s operations.

However, even with these challenges, Sierra Leone’s media sector has seen tremendous legal reforms, following decades of advocacy by civil society, media organisations and donors. Particularly problematic was a draconian, colonial-era seditious libel law that criminalised the media profession. In 2020 and 2021, Sierra Leone’s Parliament repealed the criminal libel laws contained in Part 5 of the Public Order Act of 1965, and enacted a new IMC Act and Cyber Security and Crimes Act.

Support for reform

BBC Media Action has supported reforms to media laws and policies through its Protecting Independent Media for Effective Development (PRIMED) media support consortium. With PRIMED support, the IMC has revised the code of practice for journalists and complaint mechanisms; the central government also provides annual subsidies to the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists, in the amount of 500 million Leone (about £32,000). All these initiatives were critical to unshackle the media, provide an environment for investment, and create a basis for the production and dissemination of freely available public interest content.

Media that work in the public interest are essential to advancing democracy, prosperity, and stability. But these legislative and policy reforms alone are not enough to guarantee and sustain press freedom, and independent, pluralistic and trusted public interest content. A viable media must be able to balance income and expenditure to sustain free and fair journalism. As long as advertising markets dwindle, and without policies to guide government adverting, media houses were undoubtedly going to fall on the trappings of corruption, nepotism, and state capture.

Wooing investors

In recognition of these challenges – and undoubtedly also for political considerations - the President of Sierra Leone, on the occasion of the signing of a revised public order act, committed to organising a national media investment conference to woo investors into the media. To deliver on this political commitment, the Minister of Information and Communication gathered a committee of stakeholders from the media, government, private sector, and civil society to organise a national media investment conference. But one full year after the formation of this committee, no significant progress had been made - until BBC Media Action was invited to contribute technical and logistical support.

The idea of the media investment conference sat well with PRIMED’s objective to promote a viable media ecosystem, supporting the free flow of trusted public interest content. But we also sensed over-optimism on the part of the government, that merely bringing together private sector actors would result in large investment in the media sector. We knew this was impossible, given the economy of Sierra Leone and the changing nature of media globally.

Speakers and organisers pose ahead of the Sierra Leone National Media Viability and Investment Conference in Freetown, 21-22 April 2022. Photo courtesy of BBC Media Action Sierra Leone.

A wider conversation

But we were motivated by the conviction provided by the concept of a media investment conference, and the entry point it would provide for a wider conversation on media viability and investment. We recruited two consultants – one international and one Sierra Leonean – to design a national consultation that would lead to a binding constraints analysis, and a business case for media investment in Sierra Leone. We also commissioned six papers [LINK] to inform the process - including a political economy analysis of the media in Sierra Leone, the potential for investment, and examinations of advertising policies, models of public subsidies and global funding mechanisms for public interest media.

Formally opened by the president of Sierra Leone, HE Brigadier-General Julius Maada Bio, the National Media Viability and Investment Conference brought together 300 media industry stakeholders, the private sector, government and civil society leaders in a two-day gathering – both in-person and online, to discuss challenges limiting investment in the media, pathways for sustainable media funding, and options for improved financial viability that were both appropriate and context specific. The session culminated in a set of broad principles as recommendations for a National Action Plan for media viability in Sierra Leone, anchored around seven thematic areas:

The Government of Sierra Leone should continue to show the political will necessary to drive media market reforms
A review of the existing media legal and regulatory framework
The media should commit to re-engineering the industry in order to boost the potential for attracting private-sector investment and public subsidies
The Government should take affirmative action to promote community media and the public service broadcaster, the Sierra Leona Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC)
The introduction of a national policy on advertising
Government and development partners should commit to a national fund for public interest media
Stakeholders should seek to address the existing gender imbalance in the media industry

Broad national acceptance

The National Action Plan, still to be further developed with detailed activities and timelines, has broad national appeal and acceptance, and was unveiled by Mohamed Rahman Swaray, the minister of information and communications, at the UNESCO World Press Freedom Day Global Conference in Puta Del Este, Uruguay.

The next step is to present the plan to Sierra Leone’s Cabinet for review and approval – and it is after this stage that the real work of translating the plan into action will commence.

On the global stage in Uruguay, Sierra Leone’s progress was presented as a gold standard in the implementation of the Windhoek+30 commitment. This progress is also evident in Sierra Leone’s ranking in the 2022 World Press Freedom Index report published by Reporters Without Borders: now 46th out of 180 countries, jumping 29 places up from 75th position in 2021.

A BBC Media Action for PRIMED panel at the World Press Freedom Day Global Conference in Uruguay, 2 May 2022. Photo courtesy of UNESCO.

Time to consolidate gains

But it is critical now that the gains made in Sierra Leone are consolidated and strengthened. Evidence tells us that press freedom without an economically secure public interest media is not enough: media will remain subject to corruption, or find themselves incapable of holding the powerful to account. The economic crisis for public interest journalism has been made even starker by dwindling advertising income for traditional media and the financial impact of COVID-19.

Sierra Leone’s national media viability action plan, when supported and fully implemented, will strengthen the gains made in media’s legal landscape, and re-engineer the industry to boost its potential to attract private sector investment. It will support the establishment of advertising policies that are fair for all, and establish and roll out a national fund for public interest media with government and donor funding.

The plan will also provide a platform for collaboration among stakeholders - including government, media practitioners, the private sector, civil society and donors – to work together to support and guarantee the independence and viability of the media, so that they can provide freely available and trusted public interest content that is critical to democratic and national development.

The plan is a road map – but it requires piloting and support, especially at in this inception stage.

Idriss Mamoud Tarawallie speaks at the World Press Freedom Day Global Conference panel, 2 May 2022. Photo courtesy of UNESCO.

Protecting Independent Media for Effective Development is a media support consortium led by BBC Media Action working in Sierra Leone, Ethiopia and Bangladesh.

More information on the Sierra Leone National Media Viability and Investment Conference, and the research studies commissioned as part of the National Action Plan, can be found on our website.

PRIMED is funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

Media’s existential crisis and the consequences for peace

2019-11-12T13:40:55+00:00

Independent media are vital to enabling peaceful and effective development. But that role has rarely been so endangered, with the consequences for governance and democracy so great. The international response to the threat is poorly prioritised and poorly organised.

The crisis confronting independent media around the world is a crisis of democracy, freedom and human rights. It is also a crisis with profound implications for development and peace.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of the classic work, Development as Freedom by Nobel Prize winning economist, Amartya Sen. “No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy,” he wrote, arguing elsewhere that the question of food and starvation could not be divorced from “the issue of liberties, of newspapers and ultimately of democracy.” This analysis holds remarkably true, but depends upon media being capable of playing its assumed role – able to expose wrongdoing, mismanagement or emerging crises, and to have public legitimacy sufficient that government feels impelled to respond.

Those assumptions are being challenged. Media institutions around the world, especially in resource-poor settings, are increasingly co-opted by those in, or close to, power. There is growing evidence that the public is losing trust and confidence in information and news, as online misinformation and disinformation flourishes. The business models capable of supporting public interest media are disappearing as advertising moves online. Many countries are losing the essential safety valve that Sen argued was vital if calamitous mistakes were not to be made.

An increasing risk of famine is just one probable consequence. Vaccination boycotts and attacks on health outreach workers prompted by misinformation campaigns are becoming increasingly common and are proving a major obstacle to the elimination of polio and a central factor in the resurgence of formerly manageable diseases such as measles.

The evidence that a free media acts as one of, if not the most, effective check on corruption is venerable and long standing. Fear of journalistic scrutiny helps explain the tragic escalation in killings and attacks on journalists documented by media freedom monitors in recent years. As free and independent media declines, incidences of corruption can be expected to increase, with concerning knock-on effects for development and social cohesion. Corruption is a principal driver of violent extremism and social unrest. Without media as a principal check on corruption, there are broader, deeply concerning consequences for governance.

Elections are becoming ever less democratic. Evidence is emerging of the manipulation of electoral processes principally through subverting information and communication spaces and controlling independent media. Elections are increasingly susceptible to manipulation by those adept at exploiting big data (and those who pay for such manipulation). Hate speech is on the rise and social cohesion, already often weak in fragile states, increasingly undermined. Misinformation and disinformation have become endemic, contributing to social tension and conflict, and access to trusted and trustworthy information from domestic media has declined.

The increasing fragmentation and fracturing of media has accompanied a decline in independent media capable of engaging people across societal divides, undermining society’s capacity to negotiate differences. The decline in channels for public debate, shared public spaces and trusted reference points for national public conversations is contributing to a rise in suspicion, blame and stigmatisation of the “other” in society.

There is a long and growing list of consequences of the loss of independent media, yet effective responses to the challenge have been scant. International response needs to be better prioritised, better organised and better resourced. Important new initiatives have emerged in recent months including the Information and Democracy Commission launched by Reporters without Borders and the July 2019 Defend Media Freedom conference organised by the UK and Canadian governments.

Another initiative, proposed by BBC Media Action, is the creation of a new, ambitious International Fund for Public Interest Media. Loosely modelled on the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria, it focuses on supporting independent media in settings where market failure is especially acute or media freedom especially under threat. With the support of Luminate, we have recently completed a consultation document outlining how such a Fund might be governed, structured and operated. Such a Fund would serve to galvanise international donor support, essential in protecting not only independent media, but the gains in peacebuilding and good governance to which they are essential.

The consultation document is available on request from the author.

Media freedom and rethinking support to independent media

2019-05-01T09:00:00+00:00

At BBC Media Action we are dedicated to the cause of media freedom – the principle that expression and communication through media is a right that should be exercised freely -which is at the very core of effective democracies and inclusive societies. This freedom can never be taken for granted, and cannot be exercised in many places around the world.

This World Press Freedom Day commemorates another dark year, with precipitous plunges in rankings on media freedom indices and increasing – and increasingly egregious – attacks on journalists, most notably the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.

Independent, sustainable public interest media are increasingly threatened, not just by laws and politics, but also by economics and the sheer pace of technological change. Each day, we see media co-opted by the powerful, and challenged to secure income that comes without strings attached, especially as more and more advertising revenue becomes concentrated in the pockets of those with a powerful hold over online eyeballs and clicks.

This crisis faced by public interest media, particularly in resource poor settings, is so great that we at BBC Media Action are working hard to apply fresh thinking, advance new strategies and mobilise substantial new resources to address it.

BBC Journalist, Hassan Arouni, interviewing members of the community in Sierra Leone

For 20 years, we have supported media freedom and strengthened media in fragile and developing countries, working with partners to develop conditions and skills in support of independent media which meet public needs and provide space for constructive public dialogue. Our work is rooted in the values and mission of the BBC in its focus on supporting independent media that is trusted, can engage as many parts of society as possible, and that works in the public interest. Our expertise spans financial sustainability; creative, editorial and production capabilities; governance and regulatory environments; and supporting networks to help build media’s resilience to political pressures.

In the last six years alone, we’ve supported independent media to enable informed public debate around more than ten elections, reaching over 124 million people. And we have some great success stories to share from our work with our partners around the world, in some very challenging contexts.

In Southern Iraq, public service broadcaster Radio Al Mirbad has grown from its founding in 2005 into a fully independent, highly influential local entity, supported by our distance mentoring, production and editorial advice. Some 81% of its weekly audience agree that Al Mirbad follows up and monitors the work of government, and 86% agree that it speaks for Iraqi citizens. The dedicated YouTube channel for its popular satirical videos has more than four million subscribers and 850 million lifetime views.

Community voices in Iraq- Al Mirbad

In Zambia, we have been working with local independent radio stations since 2011, to help them strengthen their capacity and improve their sustainability and community impact. Recent research shows that people who listened regularly to these radio programmes and outdoor debates on local issues were significantly more likely to feel that they could positively influence their community’s politics and governance issues over those who did not listen.

Mentoring programme in Zambia

In Tanzania, Haba na Haba (Slowly But Surely) is the nation’s most widely broadcast radio show. We produce this national, accountability-focused programme with local broadcast partners, who in turn make their own sister shows, each with their own brands and social media presence, which add around 500,000 listeners to the overall Haba na Haba audience, which now stands at 5 million people. These shows are now largely financially self-sustaining. Our team of mentors and producers are supporting these partners to prepare for the ultimate handover of the large national show, by building production skills and improving their commercial viability.

Haba na Haba community discussion

But despite the real significance of these successes, we believe that new ways of working in - and thinking about - media development are critical to turn the tide in favour of genuinely independent public interest media. Multi-level change and new alliances are needed to help build the skills, management structures and financial models required to support high-quality, balanced, independent editorial content. So, too, are supportive regulatory and legal reforms, paired with political will at all levels to call out repression of free media and abuses against journalists.

Donor support in this space is critical too - both to help address market failures and support the discovery and application of new media support strategies, fit for a changing world. And donors need to be armed with better information about how, where and when their support can be most effectively channelled.

The challenges remain immense. Alongside political attacks on media, the economic environment for independent public interest media is increasingly hostile, to the extent that in many fragile and resource poor settings, a market model barely exists. Cognisant of these challenges, in recent months we’ve been actively working with local, national and international organisations to explore how – together - we might do media development differently, and better.

What we think needs to change

We believe that media development must be clearly guided by locally-led, systems-wide strategies, rooted in robust market analysis. Bringing local actors together to identify key challenges and ways forward through structured, participatory processes is a critical first step. Multi-disciplinary expertise is then required to address the challenges identified on the ground, bringing in players from the private as well as not-for-profit sectors. At BBC Media Action, we are more committed than ever to playing our part in forming and collaborating with open and diverse partnerships to drive change.

We also need to do more to make sure that these strategies grapple with the tensions inherent in delivering media support in media landscapes fragmented by the unequal pace of technological change. Platforms that are trusted sources of information are no longer always the same as those capable of convening constructive public debate. To address this, in any context, we need to focus on supporting media partners who can do both. We also need to find ways to reach poor and marginalised audiences with public interest media now, whilst also devising approaches fit for purpose in a rapidly changing digital age.

Turbo-charging learning in this sector is critical too. While project level impact data and sharing on the effectiveness of media development initiatives have improved significantly in recent years, a clear evidence base on enabling financial viability and political resilience of independent media is sparse, especially in fragile and resource-poor settings. This evidence gap is widening as the environments in which independent media operates deteriorates, and exacerbated by a lack of opportunity to share evidence and then apply it to practical work on the ground. At BBC Media Action we want to do more to address this. One strategy we are actively pursuing with partners and donors is the establishment of a Media Development Lab, to substantially accelerate learning and sharing of learning in this field.

Finally, as well as helping to build the commercial viability of our local media partners we are arguing strongly for continued and committed international support to media development, in part through a Global Fund for Public Interest Media. With funding from Luminate, we are now carrying out a feasibility study, working in close collaboration with partners carrying out other international policy initiatives designed to further the critical cause of free, public interest around the world.

On World Press Freedom Day, we all feel keenly the threats posed to media freedom. Together we need to mark successes while committing to rethinking media support, to ensure that resilient, viable and independent media survive and thrive in this increasingly challenging landscape.

The faults, fissures and connections between media development and social and behaviour change communication

2018-05-21T08:00:00+00:00

This year’s World Press Freedom Day celebrations were two weeks after the largest ever conference focused on Social and Behaviour Change communication (SBCC). The two worlds, which I sometimes uncomfortably straddle, have a history of not connecting.

The SBCC Summit had a broad agenda, ranging from mass media outputs to reduce maternal mortality to behavioural economics and artificial intelligence. The relationship between those using media in these ways and those supporting independent journalism has been a source of tension and disagreement over decades. But as support to both independent media and social and behaviour change communication (also called “communication for development”) appears to be growing, including in donor strategies, it is worth asking whether this tension is really justified.

The disagreements work in both directions, but if we are to achieve the concerted and connected action necessary to support healthy democratic information and communication environments in the 21st century we must avoid unnecessary arguments. This is one we need to get over.

Often independent media organisations in developing countries see social and behaviour change communication as instrumental and, at worst, actively undermining them. They sometimes resent the appropriation of broadcast airwaves and news pages with paid for messages apparently telling people what to do and what to think. They resent large budgets spent trying to “train journalists” to write on favoured issues of development NGOs and donors with little or no investment going to the institutions and journalistic architecture necessary to support a strong media sector. They feel journalism exists to hold all actors in society to account, especially those with power and money which includes many development actors, so they are cautious about attempts to “get them on board” with a development communication agenda.

Social and behaviour change communication practitioners have their own concerns. They witness the issues they see as crucial to saving lives routinely sensationalised and misrepresented in journalistic reporting in ways that increase stigma, prejudice and fear. Whether the issue is domestic violence or HIV, malaria or safe handwashing, preparation against natural disaster or getting girls into school, they see much to be gained from encouraging better journalism and public communication around issues which are matters of life and death to millions. They are baffled by the resistance to these efforts by some media development actors.

I have found myself at different times vehemently agreeing with each side. Working with BBC Media Action colleagues on a policy briefing on the media of Nepal recently, the level of anger we found directed at international NGOs - for what many journalists considered substantial capture of the broadcast airwaves - was acute. They complained bitterly that international paid for content of little relevance or resonance to communities was taking the place of local issues and voices. What the Nepali media – including community media – needed, they said, was funding so that they could be what they should be, not the mouthpieces of international development actors.

On the other hand, I spent much time in the 1980s and 1990s working with others to raise public understanding of HIV/AIDS issues in the countries where the virus was spreading most rapidly. Media coverage in these countries was often deeply damaging to the response especially in its stigmatisation of people with HIV/AIDS. Worse still, there were cases where even serious news organisations in the West denied the links between HIV and AIDS. I think some of this reporting had a real chilling effect which prevented policy action focusing on HIV for some time. An epidemic of roughly 4 million people being infected in the mid-1980s transmuted into a pandemic of almost 30 million by the time affordable treatments became available in the early 2000s. To this day I get irritated by media development organisations talking about social and behaviour change communication as being all about “AIDS messaging” when the best organisations responding to the pandemic were as focused on generating voice and dialogue as they were on information provision.

There are examples of work across both fields that show I am not the only one to see these divides as unhelpful.
Leading media development organisations like the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation (Foundation for a new IberoAmerican Journalism), ANDI or AMARC have a clear focus on achieving social change and advancing development objectives. Most media development organisations justify their receipt of development funding by arguing that they contribute to improved development outcomes – even if that is couched in terms of improving accountability or social cohesion. A central thrust of media development action in recent years has been to position independent media as a key concern of international development actors, including concerted (and successful) advocacy by organisations like the Global Forum for Media Development to get the issue integrated into the Sustainable Development Goals.

And the “SBCC” field increasingly recognises that change happens through dialogue, debate and action rather than messaging. Two decades ago, the “SBCC” field was a “BCC” one focused largely on achieving individual level behaviour changes. The “Social” is now centre stage as we understood that improvements in family planning owed more to the women’s liberation movement than it did to improved awareness of contraception, that preventing the spread of HIV owed more to the empowerment and action of those affected by the virus than it did to communication around wearing condoms. Today, communication is increasingly about social change whether in the form of the #MeToo movement, new forms of identity politics, or communities in Sierra Leone organising themselves to plan for when Ebola might strike. Debate and dialogue requires healthy, independent information and communication spaces.

There is also increased recognition in the SBCC field that techniques to achieve shifts in behaviour are becoming ever more sophisticated and effective. Behavioural economics provides a powerful positive addition to the options of approaches available but the role of Cambridge Analytica and the capacity to meld advances in behavioural psychology with big data and online communication provide deeply concerning prospects for what “social and behavioural change” might look like in the future. So the SBCC field is increasingly focused on developing clear ethical frameworks for its work and leading the debate on “who decides” what norms get shifted and which behaviours get changed.

An emphasis on people is a key way to bridge these divides. Media development actors believe that people need information and platforms for public debate to take and influence the decisions that shape their lives. So too do social and behaviour change communication actors. The former may mostly focus on, for example, decisions around how to exercise democratic rights (most obviously around electoral choices). The latter may focus on having the information to decide to decide to have your child vaccinated against polio. These may sound very different arenas but let’s take polio. The principal challenge of eradicating polio in recent years has not been a lack of a vaccine, a functioning system to deliver that vaccine or lack of public awareness. In a small number of countries it has been rumours and misconceptions – often fanned through social media –that the vaccine is a Western plot. Ultimately, efforts to eradicate polio rest on access to information that the people most affected by an issue can trust and relate to their lives. That is the preserve as much of media development as it is of social and behaviour change communication.

There are encouraging signs of improved organisation within these fields and across them. On the media development side, the Global Forum for Media Development has become an increasingly effective and organised network of media development actors working together to improve the credibility, effectiveness and importance of the field. A new alliance – the “Global Alliance for Social and Behaviour Change Communication: building informed and engaged societies” has been formed through the leadership of several organisations, especially Unicef and the Communication Initiative (my organisation is or will be a member of both). I hope that an agreement will be reached to at least connect and cooperate with each other.

James Deane is Director of Policy and Research at BBC Media Action. He is also on the international steering committee of the Global Forum for Media Development and on the advisory board of the Communication Initiative. He is an adviser to the OECD Development Assistance Committee Governance Network focused on improving donor coordination around media assistance and has provided strategic support to networks of philanthropic organisations focused on media support.

From impatient optimism to sober and determined realism: What needs to happen next?

2018-05-03T08:00:00+00:00

Many more issues and strategies can be considered but, ultimately, there is little point considering them unless there is space to properly organise the 21st century approaches necessary for media assistance to succeed.

Several things need to happen.

First, those funding international support to the media need to link up more to share learning of what they think works and what doesn't. This has not happened successfully in the past but signs are emerging that it can now. Private philanthropic foundations – such as the Omidyar, Ford, Open Society, Gates, Rockefeller, MacArthur and Knight Foundations - are leading the way in sharing information and strategic thinking between them better than even a year or two ago. Bilateral agencies (especially long standing supporters of independent media like the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Swiss Development Cooperation and now DFID) are re-examining and reprioritising media support while reaching out to other donors to explore how they can learn from each other. The OECD Development Assistance Committee Governance Network (full disclosure: I advise it) has provided the most valuable space in recent months and years for these issues to be prioritised and examined, and there are hopes of a more intensive level of communication between donors on the issues as a result. The National Endowment for Democracy Center for International Media Assistance is playing a particularly strong role here.

Such conversations have always proved challenging. Various donors have often had different agendas and objectives ranging from supporting independent media as an intrinsic public good (something that is thankfully being reprioritised) to seeing it as a means to improve specific development objectives (improving accountability, fostering greater social cohesion, challenging misinformation, shifting societal norms around gender for example). But the conditions for a really coherent and productive donor conversation in this area have rarely been more fertile.

The second is between practitioners and donors. I will be candid here: media assistance donors (with some exceptions) do not always have a good reputation among practitioners. Practitioners have, with at least modest success, tried to create a more coherent sector. Through the Global Forum for Media Development in particular very different - often competing - organisations talk to each other, share analysis and information, and at least start to work towards better coordination mechanisms and generate advocacy for what is needed to improve public interest media. GFMD has sought to give its developing country/non-western members interests special prominence.

The same has not happened among donors. The efforts at donor coordination highlighted above are welcome but late, and the feeling in the sector is that donors frequently chop and change priorities, pay little attention to evidence (and insufficiently invest in it), and invest too little in their own lesson learning. Some have acknowledged this. A particularly welcome EU study revealed just how little the EU knew what it was funding in this space, let alone understanding what worked and did not work. As a result it has now set up a new technical resource to advise it in the future. Practitioners tend to know a great deal about the problems they are working to solve but that knowledge is not always well captured by donors. There needs to be better information sharing here. There are particular dangers that failed strategies of the past will be repeated.

Third, and perhaps most important, is for the rest of the development community to recognise just how critical a free and independent media that's capable of underpinning informed democratic societies is to sustaining, and advancing, human progress. Even within most governance support strategies, let alone across the rest of the Sustainable Development Goal agenda, media support issues are poorly prioritised.

And finally, there is a need for a much stronger research base which, as noted above, is interdisciplinary in nature. I have found it curious that the most insightful and useful research we tend to use emanates from economists and political scientists, not from media scholars.

To be taken seriously in the media assistance space in recent years, especially in the digital space, it has been important to cultivate a persona of “impatient optimism”. But I believe we are in serious trouble and do not currently have the strategies, sector wide architectures, resources, research or learning systems to make the kind of difference to 21st century media and communication systems that sustainable and functioning democracies and a sustainable development agenda needs. We have much good practice to build on but there is a poor collective record of building on it.

Making a real difference will take years, and optimism has proved neither warranted nor particularly effective. We need fresh approaches, new determination and a collective preparedness – not least from donors – to commit ourselves for a long haul. Pessimism is not energising, but a fresh and sober realism may be our best starting point for the road ahead.

James Deane is the Director of Policy and Research at BBC Media Action

The fifth blog in this series explores the relationship between media development and Social and Behaviour Change Communication.

Supporting independent media institutions: some BBC Media Action thinking

2018-05-01T16:18:05+00:00

The challenges highlighted in the first two blogs have, for some time, prompted much reappraisal and shifts in strategies by many media support organisations, BBC Media Action included.

Working in fragile states where media markets were weak, we shifted our strategy in order to support and strengthen media institutions by co-producing or supporting the production of content which could deliver clear benefits to people: increasing their capacity to hold power to account, improving political participation, and fostering dialogue in increasingly polarised societies.

We were especially proud of our capacity to work with a huge diversity of media partners – community, commercial, social as well as national public service or state broadcasters – to reach well over 200 million people a year. Embedded within our cooperation, the work included intensive training, supporting organisational development and building sustainability. We have also been proud of our investments in research – in understanding what people want and expect from their media, and in better measurement and learning systems (including within our capacity building work).

We have much evidence to suggest that we have achieved a great deal of impact through the projects we have implemented in recent years and we are proud of our record. But in terms of building really strong, economically viable, lasting media institutions, our record like (we suspect) many others, is more patchy. We want to find fresh approaches to overcome these challenges and make public interest media programmes and public interest media institutions more sustainable.

We are looking at different models for doing this but, to take one example, we have a strong reputation for the research we do, particularly in understanding the information and communication realities, expectations and needs of people in society. We are looking at how our audience research, in particular, can be put to more use by our partners so that they can sell advertising off the back of it. And how we can draw on our own research expertise (much of it residing in our country offices) to build the audience research capacity of independent media partners.

We are looking at how not only to support the sustainability of traditional media partners but also the social media platforms we have supported. Many of these are playing the same role as a public service broadcaster but at far less cost and potentially with much better long-term prospects than (say) transforming state broadcasters (although we are not giving up on that). The long running Al Mirbad radio station in Iraq (which we helped found in 2005) now has almost 1.4 million followers on Facebook and 1.8 million subscribers on YouTube. El Kul our online news and current affairs show for Libyans is among the top five most active Facebook pages in the country.

We are looking at how some of the success we have achieved in our in-depth mentoring programmes in countries like Zambia, Tanzania and Nepal (where journalist trainers provide on site support for several months at a time) can be adapted elsewhere. And we want to work with our partners to examine in more depth why some of the programmes we support cannot be better monetised. The programmes - public debates, dramas, and online news platforms - that we support our partners to produce, often reach huge audiences, more than one third of the adult population of some of the countries in which we operate. That suggests there is a market for public interest media that commands trust and that there might be ways to fund it commercially.

And yet when we stop supporting such programmes, our partner broadcasters too often replace them with imported programmes or other content that does little to underpin public debate (although there are encouraging instances where they are continued). While this might seem a puzzle (why not produce the same programmes themselves to the same standards and sell lots of advertising off the back of it?) - we know why this is the case. The programmes we support are intensively researched (so they respond to the issues people want to talk about), they are highly inclusive (so the people involved are representative of the whole of the country especially the economically and politically marginalised), they are fiercely independent (which takes a great deal of negotiation with powerful interests) and they address really difficult issues (which in countries like Afghanistan makes organising them a significant security operation).

All that makes them valued, impactful and popular but also more complex to produce than alternatives that can fill prime time slots. It is often a better commercial equation simply to replace them with programmes that are sometimes cheaper and generally less political even if that means some drop in audience numbers. Confronting these challenges is just one of the matters that we need to get better at.

These are the just some examples of the work of one institution. Really making a difference will require a sector wide approach and we need much better systems of coordination and strategic coherence to do that successfully. That is the subject of my next blog.

James Deane is the Director of Policy and Research at BBC Media Action

A future agenda for media assistance?

2018-05-01T10:22:35+00:00

A future agenda for media assistance cannot simply repeat the same strategies that have applied – sometimes successfully, sometimes not, in the past. What do we know has worked, what do we know has not worked, what might work in the future?

I suspect there is widespread agreement that the democratic information space of the future will require strong, public interest institutions capable of generating journalism and other media content capable of underpinning informed public debate. The arguments of a decade ago, that citizen journalism would replace journalistic institutions, and t hat social media would usher in a new democratic information space where “if it is important, the news will find me”, now seem perilously outdated. Our information spaces have rarely been more vulnerable to manipulation and distortion, our public debate rarely more driven to polarisation and subject to echo chamber effects, and people’s trust in the information they receive, rarely weaker.

Access to information that people can trust, find relevant, that underpins informed democratic debate, and can hold power to account, will depend on the existence of media institutions, not just information networks. That remains the major challenge of media support. It is a challenge that we need fresh thinking to achieve.

The most obvious area where we can expect action is in continuing and perhaps revamping media investment strategies. The dream, some would argue chimera, of media assistance has been to invest in the kinds of independent media who can develop a sustainable business model sufficient to support high quality independent, public interest journalism. There have been good examples where this approach has worked and fostered fantastic, independent news organisations, most notably through fantastic organisations like the Media Development Investment Fund. I stand to be corrected but I think most (but certainly not all) of those successes have been in large markets (like Indonesia and Malaysia). The challenge comes when applying this approach in smaller markets, particularly in fragile states, given the current economic and political realities.

Fragile states have two overlapping challenges. The market is small and often highly fractured making it extremely difficult to build a profitable business model capable of sustaining independent journalism. That challenge has grown as digital and social media has, as it has done elsewhere, diverted funding away from independent media markets.

The second is that politics has proved overwhelmingly powerful.

I had the privilege of working alongside wonderful Ugandan colleagues in the 1990s, as the media market – print and broadcast - thrived in the wake of economic and political liberalisation. The opening of economic and political space led to media, such as that owned by the Monitor Group, doing perhaps the best journalism in Africa, and outstanding innovations such as “ebimeeza” open air radio talk shows. All of which did much to nourish the democracy that was emerging after the authoritarian horrors of the Amin and Obote years. This was an entrepreneurial, commercial revolution built on the individual commitments and journalistic talents of remarkable people. It enabled, as never before, communicative power to leak from government to citizen.

We have witnessed, since the mid-2000s, the slow death of the independent media sector in the country (and to differing extents in other countries in the region). Partly, these businesses were never going to be money printing machines given the broader challenges the internet brought to almost all media markets. But much of it was that pressure from government and other political actors simply became too strong.

This is just one example but it is a familiar story in fragile states with weak economies characterised by highly contested politics. The political markets have outgunned the economic markets. It is not that the market is simply not there (although it is probably increasingly the case that it isn’t). It is that the political pressures that come with doing good journalism and forming an independent media and creative industry blew market forces away. It is a story told in different ways, in different contexts and with different drivers in the vast majority of states our own analysis at BBC Media Action has focused on in recent years including Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Kenya, Pakistan, Nepal and most of the states of the Arab Uprisings.

That doesn’t mean the market cannot form part of the solution. It means we need to spark a creative debate about making markets work for freedom. This will mean calling on economists, technologists, and political scientists - not just media - and drawing on experience and existing research into market economies in fragile states. This requires a real interdisciplinary approach of the kind that our academic, organisational and donor structures have proved poorly equipped to facilitate in the past.

But, however imaginative the proposals, the market will not provide a long-term solution to supporting public interest media. It hasn’t in the past, and conditions, especially in fragile states, are just too hostile for it to be expected to do in the future - which is why we need to think, equally creatively, about public subsidy.

This does not necessarily mean rolling out a BBC-style public service broadcast model (although there is room for creative ways of doing that). It means looking at solutions that can provide sustained investment in independent media over a significant period of time. Can entertainment media be levied to support public interest journalism? Can public interest media funds be set up within countries where public interest media is most threatened? Can we think of other ways in which licence fees for public interest media can be raised? (there are many models for this), can the value inherent in data cross-subsidise good journalism? I don’t pretend to have answers, but there needs to be creative thinking about what those answers should be, without resting on the assumption that investment automatically leads to commercial sustainability.

More fundamentally still, solving these issues will be insufficient if they don’t connect with people. Much media support has focused on media for a relatively elite audience. Media freedom and media sustainability indicators focus on whether media is free and sustainable and less on on whether they are valued, trusted or relevant to the populations of their societies, especially those outside an educated middle class. This is especially important at a time of digital and demographic transformation.

The donor and media assistance community are finally realising there are no digital, magic bullets to these problems and that the digital revolution is as much a driver of market failure and disinformation and a wrecker of public interest media as it is an enabler of it (although there remain many exciting opportunities). But it is a transformation whose effects have only just started to take hold (smart phone access is still far from universal but in a small number of years it will be) and any media support strategy that does not root itself in the realities of 21st century information and communication networks access will fail.

And finally here, we need to pay more attention to re-balancing the incentive structures so that there is a greater political price to be paid for political interference in independent media – that means really embarrassing and holding to account in a much more insistent way those who are shutting down or co-opting the media. This would consist of further investment in media freedom advocacy and a much more robust approach and focused interest from governments committed to democracy and freedom of expression both North and South (sadly a diminishing number – in both number and power). Attacks on media freedom and independent media systems proliferate because those behind the attacks prosper and get away with it. Events such as World Press Freedom Day organised by UNESCO take on greater importance in this context.

There are plenty of other areas we can talk about – improving support to media around elections (which is generally very poorly prioritised, organised and integrated into electoral support strategies), understanding and more effectively supporting public interest media in the context of violent extremism, working out how best to support independent journalism in fragile states where the risks are so often so great, better structuring media support within governance programming and much more besides. These issues present challenges for all of us.

In my third blog, I talk about just some of things BBC Media Action is planning especially in my area of research and policy.

James Deane is director of policy and research at BBC Media Action.

Efforts to support independent media are being outgunned - some thoughts on how it can fight back

2018-04-30T08:00:00+00:00

“We will support and promote the freedom of the press”, announced Penny Mordaunt, the British international development secretary in her big speech earlier this month setting out her government’s future international development strategy.

After years in the doldrums, support to independent media shows signs of being revitalised. Many other donors – from philanthropic foundations to bilateral and multilateral development agencies – are recognising that prospects for human progress in the 21st century are increasingly tied to how people are informed or misinformed, how information is controlled or liberated, and how media institutions remain independent in the face of authoritarian or factional power. It is rooted in a recognition too of just how essential good journalism is to functioning democracies (take your pick from Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Cambridge Analytica and myriad other examples from around the world).

The media support community has been a gloomy place in recent years. The heyday of independent media support was in the 1990s and 2000s when democracy was – or at least appeared to be – sweeping the world. The last two years have been especially depressing with increasingly successful clampdowns by authoritarians, unprecedented numbers of journalists killed or imprisoned, the ever more influential role of misinformation and disinformation in disrupting democratic politics, the growth of propaganda and counter propaganda in the context of violent extremism and a degradation of respect for media freedom, not least in the US.

But it isn’t just the backdrop of world events that has darkened the mood within the media support community. It was the lack of success many traditional efforts had in really bringing into being the kinds of free, plural and professional media systems that we were collectively working to achieve.

If investment in media assistance is to return as an important development priority – and I believe it is vital that it does – then it needs to learn from what has worked and not worked in the past.

In this blog series, published around World Press Freedom Day, I today ask first why media development efforts have not had the kind of impact that their backers and investors had hoped, especially in the fragile states where most international development donors are focusing their support.

In the second I offer some ideas for fresh thinking which I hope might spur broader debate.

In the third I talk about just some of the ways BBC Media Action is approaching these issues and adapting.

In the fourth I talk about how the sector – donors, practitioners and media partners – need to be better connected and strategy much more joined up to deliver the outcomes we want to see.

And in the fifth blog, I argue that the relationship between independent media support and the substantial funding invested in social and behaviour change communication is confused and unnecessarily disconnected.

Where are the successful models of media assistance?

Where can we point to the success stories or models where thriving independent, economically sustainable, credible media organisations and industries have emerged as a result of the media assistance programmes that were put in place in many countries? Why have all those media laws, regulatory bodies and access to information provisions that had been supported to come into being had so little effect on the actual structure, conduct and independence of the media – or indeed people’s access to trustworthy information?

How was it that hundreds of journalists had been trained with often little discernible improvement in the quality of reporting? How could the tech optimism offered by the US West Coast digital giants and the democratic energy of the Arab Uprisings so quickly turn to chaos and information powered factionalism, confusion and hate? How is it that so many national elections – and broader politics - are so vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation when so much effort has gone into media assistance designed to achieve the opposite?

For sure, different media support organisations (including BBC Media Action) point to often extraordinary impact in particular areas and particular sectors – in nurturing independent journalism, in underpinning informed public debate at great scale, at building institutions and structures, in supporting elections underpinned by open and informed public debate, not disinformation and manipulation. I consider most media support organisations highly effective in what they do. But the fact remains that, especially in fragile states, the media is weaker, more co-opted and often less sustainable than for years.

The reasons are complex.

This is mostly to do with the scale of the challenge. The political incentives to control, distort or co-opt information and communication spaces (both traditional and digital) have greatly outgunned the efforts to defend and advance public interest media. I and many others predicted only a few years ago that communicative power was shifting from elites to masses, from institutions to networks and from old to young. In many ways it has – but ultimately communicative power now rests most with those who see political or other advantage in undermining informed public debate and away from those who seek to underpin it.

But ascribing the current situation solely to tectonic power shifts would let us off the hook too easily. Some of our lack of success can be attributed to hubris - a lack of understanding of (or investment in understanding) political realities and a too blind assumption that the new information environments created such a hostile environment for authoritarians that democracy and freedom would inevitably triumph. This arena is a power game and communicative power now favours the authoritarians and the factionalists. Any future agenda that does not recognise and root its response in the political economy realities of 21st Century information and communication environment will fail.

But resources – or the lack of them – have mattered and many would argue that there simply hasn’t been enough money and effort to support independent media. I would agree with this - the National Endowment for Democracy has estimated that approximately two per cent of the funding development donors allocate to improving governance is directed at supporting media (and less than half a percent of total development funding).

But that would be too convenient an explanation and one that prevents us from properly examining what we need to stop doing and what we need do better.

And it isn’t just the lack of funding, it is the organisation that underpins it. Lack of funding can’t disguise the fact that in some countries – such as Afghanistan – huge amounts have been directed at supporting independent media but such efforts have too often been inchoate. Funding in this area has been poorly organised and particularly vulnerable to boom and bust cycles, to faddism (a few years ago if a proposal didn’t include some form of digital app it was unlikely to be supported) and, generally, to poor systems of lesson learning. There are very few spaces to assess what is working and not working in supporting media and the research base underpinning the field is weak, siloed and insufficiently interdisciplinary.

Ultimately, we have to accept that media development could have been far better supported and more organised and it would still have struggled in the face of these odds. That does not mean the situation is hopeless. Public interest journalism has arguably never been better respected and recognised with the Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers and the unsung heroics of independent journalists and citizen journalists around the world never playing a more important role in democracy. The importance of independent public debate has never been more valued in environments where elections are increasingly undermined and manipulated through control of information.

And our capacity to have an evidence and reality based debate is much improved now we can take off the rose tinted spectacles offered by the digital evangelists as public interest journalism has exposed how Cambridge Analytica has allegedly used data to distort the politics of so many countries, including fragile states, around the world.

But what we can’t do in the media development space is simply to repeat the recipes and strategies of the past. We need to understand and confront our own experiences of what has worked and not worked.

That forms the basis of my second blog.

James Deane is Director of Policy and Research at BBC Media Action

3 negatives and 3 positives from World Press Freedom Day

2017-05-05T13:55:11+00:00

Given the troubling global backdrop, World Press Freedom Day arguably needed a name change in 2017. Marked annually by a gathering organised by UNESCO, this year’s ‘celebration’ in Jakarta may not have been particularly joyous, but it was certainly more important than ever.

Reflecting on the conversations and debates held in Indonesia, I’ve arrived at three reasons to be worried and three grounds for optimism. I’ll start off gloomy and end on a more upbeat note.

1. There’s been an extraordinary and horrifying leap in the number of journalists imprisoned, attacked or killed. This trend is driven by once democratic or democratising regimes turning increasingly authoritarian and is well documented in the various reports published to coincide with the Day.

2. The global norm that media freedom should be protected is eroding. Its not-so-gradual deterioration is driven by the rising influence of non-democratic regimes, as well as decreasing willingness in the West – especially in the US – to stand up for press freedom, whether at home or abroad. These trends appear to be giving great succour to authoritarians, both established and emergent, to lock up or otherwise clamp down on those who publish inconvenient content.

3. Brewing concerns over misinformation, disinformation, echo chambers, filter bubbles, hate content and extremism have reached a boiling point. Long bubbling under the surface, these increasingly characterise our century’s information space.

This is not the future the digital evangelists promised. Hope – that we’d live in a digitally connected global society, populated with better informed, more empowered citizens, all working together to overthrow authoritarians and peacefully negotiate their differences, living harmoniously in more democratic, accountable and peaceful polities – has decisively faded.

Picking up the pieces of this failed vision, tech giants at the conference (who to their credit engaged actively and prominently) focused on how to rebuild trust, combat misinformation and inoculate their networks from the growing hate and extremism infecting them.

Yet amidst all this darkness, there were some glimmers of light:

1. Sheer courage and extraordinary journalism continue to be seen around the world in increasingly hostile and dangerous conditions. The profession is rediscovering its confidence and relevance in uncovering the corruption that invariably comes with growing authoritarianism, leading citizens to appreciate it more.

2. Despair isn’t universal. The conference was hosted – a better term would be championed – by the Indonesian government. The world’s fourth most populous country and largest Muslim nation is an increasingly international champion of democracy, freedom and tolerance.

Indonesia’s own record on media freedom is far from pristine. But the country’s enthusiastic hosting of this conference (organised by the Indonesian Press Council) reminds us that media freedom isn’t simply a Western concept.

Indeed, World Press Freedom Day itself was not a European or American invention. The day actually has its roots in the Windhoek Declaration, adopted by a meeting of African journalists in 1991. As the ‘West’ loses its moral leadership on these issues, there are at least some signs that others can and will take its place.

3. The role of public service media seems more relevant than ever. Already ailing from the collapse of its economic model and hard-hit by the whirlwind of digital technology, public interest journalism now has revitalised its energy and purpose.

Journalists are rising to the challenge of growing concerns over public mistrust in established sources of information and social media’s role in spreading falsehoods. Broadcasters like the BBC, which aim to offer something to everyone, certainly have to work ever harder to keep being seen as reliable and relevant by all of their audiences.

As for BBC Media Action, I believe a major reason our work is valued by our 150+ partners is that we support genuinely independent media organisations, which serve all of society, whether in Libya, Tanzania or Nepal.

Last year, we reached more than 100 million people through our support of democratic governance programmes. The sheer size of this audience suggests that people – rich and poor, rural and urban alike – want the media to provide reliable information and rigorous debate, so that they can make up their own minds about the issues they face.

It’s certainly been a gloomy year for media freedom but, if I took anything away from the conversations in Jakarta, it’s that the outlook is far from hopeless.

James Deane is Director of Policy and Learning at BBC Media Action. He tweets as @JamesMDeane.