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

该项目提议建立一个国际和跨学科研究网络，探讨国际发展援助与非洲和拉丁美洲当地新闻工作实践和培训之间的关系。该网络将使研究人员能够研究全球权力关系和外国援助的地缘政治，自第二次世界大战结束以来，外国援助的主要目的是传播符合捐助国利益的新闻实践和教育的具体模式。它将考虑在何种程度上，以美国/英国为基础的新闻实践模式的传播一直是国际发展的“现代化”项目的核心。该网络项目与新闻实践、新闻教育和批判性新闻研究有关，其背景是外国援助/发展援助对这些地区的影响，以及这如何影响这些发展中地区培育批判性和独立媒体部门的能力。鉴于当代全球新闻媒体格局的巨大变化，特别是在新闻实践和真正独立的“监督”新闻的有限潜力方面，研究人员和从业人员需要批判性地重新评估外部对新闻的影响与当地文化和新闻实践之间的关系。这有助于对发展中区域公共话语的性质进行审议性评估，有可能使公共领域向更多不同的声音开放，并有助于民主化项目。在这种情况下，批判性的学术方法更常见于艺术和人文研究，而不是更典型的社会科学方法来分析新闻，特别有价值。我们建议汇集一个研究人员网络，他们可以提供基于批判政治经济学和后殖民研究方法的批评，以历史和现在对拉丁美洲和非洲国际发展援助的当地新闻部门的贡献。该网络将促进关于利用国际发展援助的讨论和研究，以及更广泛的后殖民依赖结构（Easterly 2006），以促进或抑制特定的新闻模式。我们从这样一个假设开始，即自20世纪40年代末以来，美国/英国新闻范式的传播是国际援助工作的核心，并已成为援助计划倾向于培养和支持的默认模式。冷战的地缘政治和最近的公司议程使这种模式出现了问题。此外，鉴于美国和其他西方国家在冷战背景下为遏制苏联的推进而对发展中国家的殖民地给予的支持（这在拉丁美洲和非洲尤其如此，这是该网络的大陆焦点），这些模式的存在并非没有其自身的矛盾。因此，一个进一步的兴趣是美苏对抗的结束如何重新塑造（或不重新塑造）对外援助以实现新闻现代化、多样化和独立性的问题。我们的网络最初将把联合王国的学术研究人员与两个非洲国家和两个南美洲国家的著名新闻研究人员和教育工作者联系起来，这两个国家都接受联合王国的官方发展援助。这些国家都有多样化和充满活力的媒体和民间社会部门，我们的学术参与者与之有着良好的联系。这些国家是加纳、南非、巴西和委内瑞拉，但我们的参与者也是其所在国家更广泛地区的新闻界领先专家，并有能力在其所在地区扩展网络。

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.