News Release

As democratic governance in Nigeria approaches its second anniversary, the activities of the media, believed worldwide to have a significant bearing on the successful prosecution of the form of government, is once again coming under scrutiny. Media Rights Agenda, working with ARTICLE 19, the Global Campaign for Free Expression, based in London, this month begins a Media Monitoring Project in Nigeria. The Media Monitoring Project will assess the coverage given by the media to four specific areas. These include the issues of democracy, public accountability, political and human rights issues.

The project, which in its first phase, will run for a nine-month period, will end in December 2001. Generally, the exercise aims to determine how the news media act to provide a robust atmosphere for the promotion of democratic governance, including public accountability, ensuring fair and objective coverage of political issues and political interest groups and a fair and objective coverage and the promotion of human rights issues and safeguarding the rights of disadvantaged and minority groups.

The objectives of the project are to determine the extent of coverage given to these issues by state-owned and private media. It will also determine the kind of issues that are covered as well as those left out and how comprehensively events relating to them are reported and analyzed.

For example, the monitoring exercise will establish the pattern of reporting events affecting government officials, democracy and human rights issues, in state-owned and private media. It will determine the prominence given to them, the manner in which they are reported relative to other events and the allocation of space or air-time to opposition figures to provide different view-points as opposed to official positions.

It will also determine the fairness of allocation of space/air time to the three political parties in relation to each other and relative to the time given to government officials in the media as well as how these impact upon the democratic process, how much effort is made by the news media to report government activities at the state and local government levels in order to reach the poorer and less advantaged communities, especially in rural areas.

Lastly, the project aims to determine whether the private media provide an alternative viewpoint and source of information to the state-owned media in assessing the performance of government.

Media Rights Agenda will publish monthly reports, which will draw attention to patterns of inequitable reporting, inadequacy or otherwise of analysis, commentaries and news and to provide a framework for balanced reporting in the media.

MRA expects that the exercise will provide a barometer for the media to measure their performance in reporting on the issues involved in the monitoring exercise and, therefore, undertake voluntary adjustments to bring themselves in conformity with international standards in the coverage of political issues.

It expects also that the project will provide a basis for continuous and qualitative reporting of relevant issues and the nascent democracy by the media in order to help in developing, sustaining and strengthening the culture of democracy in Nigeria.

The monitoring exercise will cover both the print and electronic media. In all, there will be ten daily newspapers and five weekly magazines to be covered during the exercise. There will also be six television and six radio stations, spread across Nigeria, which the monitoring exercise will cover. They have been deliberately selected to include private and publicly funded media having national and sectional coverage including the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.

The newspapers that will be monitored in the exercise include The Guardian, The Punch, The Comet, National Interest, ThisDay, and Daily Times. Others are Daily Champion, The Post Express, New Nigeria and Daily Trust. The magazines include TheNEWS, TELL, Newswatch, The Source and The Week.

The broadcast stations which will be monitored under the project are: Radio Nigeria in Kaduna and Lagos; Aso FM Radio, Abuja; the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) in Kaduna, Abuja and Lagos, Murhi International Television (MiTV), Lagos; Ray Power 100.5 FM radio, Lagos; Channels Television, Lagos; Minaj Broadcasting International, Obosi, Anambra State; Rivers State Radio, Port Harcourt; and the Kaduna State Radio.

While the print medium monitoring exercise will be conducted in Lagos, MRA has set up four centres around the country from where the electronic media will be monitored. Monitoring centers have been opened in Kaduna, Port Harcourt, Lagos and Abuja.

The monthly report, which will be published by MRA on its finding from the exercise, will be distributed to media houses, relevant government departments and agencies, regulatory bodies in the media such as the Nigerian Press Council, and the National Broadcasting Commission, professional associations in the media such as the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE), and the Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria (NPAN), the political parties and other interest groups and stakeholders.

The monitoring exercise began early April with a one-week training programme held at the International Press Centre (IPC) in Lagos, where the Lagos monitoring centre will be based and from where other monitoring centers will be coordinated. Mr. Rotimi Sankore, a consultant to ARTICLE 19, facilitated the training. After the one-week training, Mr. Sankore will to be available for a further two-week to provide on-the-spot technical and expert assistance for the effective take-off of the exercise before returning to London.

Mr. Sankore has had an extensive experience in Media Monitoring in eastern and southern Africa where he has conducted the training of Media Monitors and coordinated media monitoring projects on behalf of ARTICLE 19.

The media monitoring exercise is the second of such to be embarked upon by Media Rights Agenda. For six months, beginning from December 1998 through May 1999, during the elections that ushered in the present democratic government and leading to the handing over to President Olusegun Obasanjo, MRA also carried out a similar exercise. From that exercise, two reports titled: Media Scorecard and Airwaves Scorecard were published monthly over a six months period. One each of the reports focused on the Print and the Electronic media.

In that monitoring exercise, efforts were made to examine the extent of fairness exhibited by the media in giving each political party equal and uninhibited access to state their views regardless of the agenda of the parties and views their members might subscribe to. In addition, the exercise also examined how the government acted to ensure free media access to political news sources and protect the media from harassment.

The Ford Foundation is providing funding support for the Media Monitoring Project, including for the publication of the proposed monthly reports, while ARTICLE 19 is funding the training exercise for the monitors as well as the purchase of some media monitoring equipment, through funds obtained from the Swedish International Develpoment Agency (SIDA).