The practice of development journalism in the Ethiopian media landscape

Master's Thesis from the year 2017 in the subject Communications - Journalism, Journalism Professions, grade: 4.00, Addis Ababa University (College of Journalism and Communications), course: Journalism and communiction, language: English, abstract: The government media are event oriented. They lack professional integrity for the public interest by ensuring transparency and accountability by exposing corruption and investigating crimes that hinder the national development process through ethical participation in the development activity in a process oriented manner and are not finding solutions for development problems through participating in the grassroots. Structural censorship, self-censorship of journalists, unethical conduct of journalists, professional limitations, law commitment of media leaders to enforce the policy, lower level of public culture of information exchange, trespassing of editorial policy and government official's perception of DJ as a development success only reporting are challenging the practice. In contrast, privately-owned media in Ethiopia covers less development issues than the government media, gives very little time and space for the development issues of Ethiopia compared to the government media. But, in that little amount of coverage, they focus on government development actor's failure and dissimulate non-state actor's failure. Paradoxically, the private media in Ethiopia similar to government media are not applying investigative journalism and watchdog the public property. They have no role in exposing corruptions and crimes committed on public properties. Practically, they are also event oriented and Addis Ababa-based, one-sided story tellers more than the government media. Resource limitation (human, material and financial), wrong perception of government PR officers and officials towards private media and prohibition of information, government tax and null incentive for private media, lower level of public culture for information exchange and freedom of expression are the top line challenges which affected their coverage of development issues of the private media.

PHD student in media and communication studies