Media Accountability in the MENA-Region
In April 2020, the Erich Brost Institute for International Journalism with support funding from the Federal German Foreign Office started the "Media Accountability in the MENA Region" project.
The aim is to support media accountability mechanisms in 10 countries in the MENA region: Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Syria and Tunisia.
The first phase the project was to conduct a pilot-study of the current state of play of media accountability mechanisms in daily journalistic work in the study countries.
The next phase involved holding five online conferences in February 2021 on media accountability, which analyzed the outcomes as well as the recommendations of the pilot-study. More than 260 representatives from the media, such as journalists, editors-in-chief, media publishers, journalists’ associations, NGO representatives as well as academic and non-academic journalism educators provided important trends and recommendations for the future in order to enhance media accountability in the MENA region.
A regional network was formed with 39 representatives from the MENA region, who would like to support the process of fostering media accountability as an important tool of ethical media coverage within self-regulatory structures.
The project is still ongoing and provides on this online resource platform a range of tools in Arabic and English such as the video-material of conferences and workshops, research studies, ombudsmen handbooks as guidelines, interviews with Executive Directors of well-established Press Councils as well as seminar presentations (PPT) related to comparative media accountability structures.
The following resources about media accountability in the MENA region are available online:
- Introduction to "Media Accountability" (click here for more information)
- Pilot Study and Online Conference "Media Accountability in the MENA Region"
(click here for more information) - Interview with Ljiljana Zurovac, the former Executive Director of the Press Council in Bosnia and Herzegovina (click here for more information)
- Regional Network for Media Accountability in the MENA Region
(click here for more information) - Handbook for Ombudspeople (click here for more information)