Development Assistance and independent journalism in Africa and Latin America: A cross-national and multidisciplinary research network. (HN)

This project proposes an international and inter-disciplinary research network to explore the relationship between international development aid and local journalistic practice and training in Africa and Latin America. The network will allow researchers to examine the global power relations and geo-politics of foreign aid that since the end of the Second World War was substantially directed at disseminating a specific model of journalism practice and education aligned with the interests of donor nations. It will consider the extent to which the diffusion of a US/UK based model of journalism practice has been central to the 'modernisation' project in international development. This network project is linked to journalism practice, journalism education, and critical journalism studies in the context of the impact that foreign aid/development assistance has had in these regions and how this has affected the ability of these developing regions to foster a critical and independent media sector.
Given massive contemporary change in the global news media landscape, especially in regard to journalistic practice and the limited potential for genuinely independent 'watchdog' journalism, researchers and practitioners need to critically re-assess the relationship between external influences on journalism and local cultures and practices of journalism. This contribution to a deliberative assessment of the nature of public discourse in developing regions has the potential to open the public sphere to a greater variety of voices and aid the project of democratization.
In this context, the critical scholarly approaches more commonly associated with arts and humanities research than with the more typically social scientific approaches to the analysis of journalism are particularly valuable. We propose to bring together a network of researchers who can provide critique grounded in critical political economy and postcolonial studies approaches to the historical and present contribution to the local journalism sector of international development aid in Latin America and Africa. The network will foster discussion and research concerning the use of international development aid and, broadly, structures of post-colonial dependency (Easterly 2006), to promote or inhibit specific models of journalism.
We start from the assumption that the dissemination of the US/UK paradigm of journalism was central to international aid efforts since the late 1940s and has become the default model that aid programmes tend to foster and support. Such models have been problematized by the geo-politics of the Cold War and more recently by corporative agendas. Moreover, these models have not come into existence without their own contradictions, given the support that the US and other Western countries gave to dictatorships in developing countries in the context of Cold War efforts to contain the advance of the Soviet Union (this is particularly true of Latin America and Africa, the continental foci of this network). A further interest, therefore, is the question of how the end of the US-USSR confrontation re-shaped (or not) foreign aid towards journalism modernisation, diversification, and independence.
Our network will initially link UK academic researchers with prominent journalism researchers and educators in two African countries and two South America countries, each of which receive UK Official Development Assistance. Each of these countries has diverse and vibrant media and civil society sectors with which our academic participants are well connected. These countries are Ghana, South Africa, Brazil, and Venezuela, but our participants are also leading experts on journalism in the broader regions around their countries and well placed to extend the network in their regions.

There has been little critical research to date concerning how international development aid in particular and development assistance in general has impacted upon journalism (Golding, 1974), while the evaluation of development aid programmes has been carried out mainly by donor countries and NGOs, which have performed this task in instrumentalist terms. Scholarly engagement has also been limited since, until recently, research in this area was predominantly Westernised (Escobar, 2011; Curran & Park, 2000). That is, the prevalent model of Western journalism and media systems were widely accepted as part of the standard development paradigm and therefore unquestioned. Key values and core practices associated with journalism remained unchallenged in the Global South as they do largely in the Northern powers in which these originated (Chalaby, 1998; Schudson, 1981). The consequence was that alternative models and new practices within the journalism ethos remain marginalised or obstructed in developing countries.

This network will allow re-evaluation of the fundamental basis upon which current models of journalism in developing countries have been articulated. It will do this by examining the impact of development assistance and foreign aid directed towards supporting journalism practice and education. This will provide a basis from which we can reconceptualise journalism practice in developing countries while re-visiting, from a critical perspective, journalism syllabi in these regions and in models proposed by institutions such as UNESCO. The project will also bring public accountability as this network will allow citizens from donor countries, particularly the US and Western Europe, to understand better how public money has been used and continues to be used to articulate a particular model of journalism that has not always served the best interests of the beneficiary nations.

This dialogue and the outputs resulting from the project will permit a more informed civic engagement that can feed into present and future legislative debates and scrutiny around development assistance in this sector, and increase space for more independent journalistic practice and democratic participation in assistance receiving developing countries. The body of research that will emerge from the network will provide empirical evidence and analysis from which public officials, journalism educators, journalism related civil society organisations and media practitioners can draw conclusions to plan and develop different ways of performing journalism.

Finally, since we are proposing to create an inter-disciplinary research network to explore the relationship between international development assistance and local journalistic practice in Africa and Latin America, we anticipate that a variety of specific research-based and practice-based projects will spring from the collective network and the individual researchers who are involved; these would include associated research projects between media historians, media sociologists, political scientists, journalism education experts, practitioners, government officials and NGOs working with journalists and journalism training/education professionals in Africa and Latin America.