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

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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.