Search Constraints
Search Results
- Description:
- This paper analyses the concepts of development and democracy to determine their compatibility within the African situation, and discusses how the mass media could promote them. It demonstrates that, while appropriate models of the concept of democracy are still being sought, it is indisputable that there already exist sufficient elements in the African conception of human rights to provide a base for a press system that tends towards liberalism rather than authoritarianism. It, therefore, approaches the discussion from the perspective of what role the press ought to play in the African society to promote both democracy and development.
- Date Issued:
- 1988-01-01T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Africa Media Review
- Description:
- This article disaggregates the population information, education and communication (IEC) sector into: population information which includes the technical and statistical information of awareness creation; population education through formal institutions (e.g. schools) and non-formal ones (e.g. adult education programmes); and population communication aimed at fostering interest, creating demand and supporting population programme activities. It describes the typology of population information end-users (information brokers) as including policy/decision makers and implementors, service providers and professionals, NGO administrators, university lecturers and researchers, community leaders, and media workers (journalists and producers). These end-users are characterized by the fact that they are non-demographers and hence the need to put in place a 'brokerage' system for translating specialist material into non-specialist information an important aspect of popularization. The mass media are then to be used to diffuse the information so processed to target condiences. The article surveys the mass media situation in Africa and proposes ways in which they may be used to disseminate population information more effectively and accurately.
- Date Issued:
- 1990-01-01T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Africa Media Review
- Description:
- The thesis of this article is that the national interests of African states make it imperative for them to carefully evaluate, assess and examine the development of their present media structures and ownership patterns. The article identifies some of the new communication media in the African context and offers a detailed review of the national and international ramifications of their selection and adoption as privately-owned enterprises.
- Date Issued:
- 1988-01-01T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Africa Media Review
- Description:
- This study looks into the concept of democracy as it is understood within the African context and the role which the mass media could play in promoting and sustaining it. It argues that, given Africa's colonial experience and its history of struggle for human dignity and liberation, the appropriate role for the mass media must be to sustain this struggle. Accordingly, their relevance must be seen in relation to the extent to which they promote the developmental and democratic aspirations of the majority of the people. And, as such, training of African media practitioners must be predicated on the necessity to give them clear orientation for the achievement of these goals. Finally, the professional status of journalists and of the journalism profession must be acknowledged by political authorities and policy makers; journalists must be appropriately renumerated and their profession upgraded within the hierarchy of national priorities.
- Date Issued:
- 1988-01-01T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Africa Media Review
- Description:
- This paper makes a case for the study of organizational communication as essential to development communication. It briefly traces the history of development communication and how mass media became synonymous with development communication. The assumptions underlying mass media's pre-eminence is revisited in order to make a case for organizational communication in an African environment. In the later sections, it describes a model for the study of development systems and organizational communication components.
- Date Issued:
- 1995-01-01T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Africa Media Review
- Description:
- The present relations of dependency of Third World countries on the industrilizcd countries are sustained by the well-known inequalities in technological resources between the North and the South. This article presents two levels for analysing the role of media technology in perpetuating this dependency syndrome: (1) the role of technology in the information and communications sectors; and (2) the impact of multinational corporations in news coverage, and, hence, on local culture, through their news agencies and other cultural products. It posits three questions to guide technology choice in Africa: (1) Why choose a particular technology? (2) To what end? (3) Which social group(s) will benefit from the technology economically, politically, and culturally?
- Date Issued:
- 1991-01-01T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Africa Media Review
- Description:
- The decade of the 1980s could, from a communications perspective, be typified as the period of 'social mobilisation'. Rather than expanding on the theoretical assumptions underlying the social mobilisation approach for development, this article discusses the consequences of the theoretical assumptions for the use of personal and mass media, as experienced in the African context.
- Date Issued:
- 1991-01-01T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Africa Media Review
- Description:
- The concepts of media as the fourth estate and the society's watchdog are popular among communication scholars. However, a consideration of the actualization of this concept is indicative of the media's failing in playing these roles. Very often, the media marginalise and disempower the masses whose causes they ought to promote. If the media were to truly play the watchdog role as the fourth estate, then both the structure and ownership of the media must be reviewed with a view to redressing the imbalances that make them tools for the disempowerment of civil society in Africa.
- Date Issued:
- 1996-01-01T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Africa Media Review
- Description:
- The paper discusses the themes of press responsibility and public opinion and their relevance within the current socio-political economic frameworks of African nations. It stresses the pertinent role of a democratized press in democratic political systems, and the role that the press can play within the democracies if they are conscious of the great responsibility that the current transition programmes of African nations places on them. In view of the rise of so many elites in Africa (those who almost always make headline news) and their great influence in mass media output as well as the economic considerations of many media organisations in news judgement, the paper reasserts the deep ethical and professional commitment of the mass media to protecting the underprivileged in society, interpreting their points of view and acting as the voice of the voiceless in society. The paper concludes that a holistic transition programme that recognises less government presence in mass media management and output is ideal for African nations. It also calls for more professional running of the press in Africa to ensure that they fit properly as society's watchdog, the fourth estate of the realm.
- Date Issued:
- 1994-01-01T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Africa Media Review
- Description:
- The national communication systems of Africa lack articulated and formulated policy objectives to guide in decision-making that would reflect national orientations and ideological base. This article has attempted to propose a 12-stage theoretical paradigm in the process of problem identification and solution in ideological evolution within the context of the African mass media systems. As models are indispensable tools in the execution of a system's functions within the purview of public policy, such as the mass media, the theoretical paradigm on ideological evolution is, therefore, designed to point out the complementarity of theory and practice in information packaging. This article presupposes that media policy parameters are not only determined within the ideological directives of their society, but are also dependent variables of the larger policies that emanate from the ideology of their society. It is within such a setting that the contents of the national communication systems in Africa should function as microcosms that reflect the thinking of the macrocosmic entity. The article also established that through surreptitious means, there is overwhelming evidence of the prevalence of external ideological influence of Africa's former colonial overlords in most of Africa's mass media systems, South of the Sahara.
- Date Issued:
- 1991-01-01T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Africa Media Review