The Media Missionaries

3. HISTORIC OVERVIEW: AT LEAST $600 MILLION FOR THE DECADE

American assistance to journalists around the world was minimal at best in 1984 when Tom Winship, Jim Ewing and George Krimsky founded the Center for Foreign Journalists (1), and the first Alfred Friendly foreign press fellows arrived in the U.S. The U.S. State Department's visitor exchange program was bringing over groups of international journalists for several weeks a year, along with thousands of farmers, scientists and others. But there was no regular approach to showing them American media practices. No U.S. organization was exclusively dedicated to developing foreign journalism capacity, and there was no systematic training overseas using American professionals. (2)

Today development assistance to foreign media is a multimillion-dollar industry, with literally hundreds of U.S. and European organizations involved. The field of media development (3) exploded when the Iron Curtain fell, and as media, especially television, became a growing factor in the exercise of political power. Americans and West Europeans rushed in to help encourage democracy by supporting the voices of independent, free media, especially across the former Communist world. By rough estimate, at least $600 million (4) and probably much more has been devoted by American-based sources to the independent media cause over this decade, with most of the money coming from the United States government's US Agency for International Development (USAID) and U.S. Information Service (USIS) (5) , and from philanthropist George Soros's Open Society Institute. USAID alone provided an estimated $275 million from 1991-2001.(6)

Other important U.S. non-governmental organizations sponsoring media development include the Ford, Knight, McCormick Tribune foundations and the Freedom Forum. The European Union probably has donated as much as the U.S. government in money, training, equipment, legal advice and other media support. Other important non-U.S. media development players are, the Danish Agency for Development Assistance (DANIDA) ($1.44 million in 2000); the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which also is in charge of media policy in Kosovo; UNESCO's Program for the Development of Communication ($2 million in 2000); the Dutch government through Press Now; the Swedish International Development Corporation Agency (SIDA), Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the very active German foundations, (Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Friedrich Naumann Stiftung and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung). (7)

Efforts to bring foreign journalists to America also expanded, with
fellowships sponsored by the World Press Institute, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Atlantic Council, and a myriad of government-sponsored international visitor programs. One Washington NGO, the Alfred Friendly Foundation (http://www.pressfellowships.org), brought some 214 mid-career journalists from 72 developing and Warsaw Pact countries to the U.S. from 1984-2002, at a cost of more than $4.3 million, according to vice-chairman Alfred Friendly Jr. This project, launched in 1983 with an endowment from Washington Post Editor Alfred Friendly, today brings about a dozen English-speaking journalists from developing countries to the U.S. for six months each year to practice journalism in U.S. newsrooms. Alumni include top editors from such countries as Bangladesh, China, Colombia, Croatia, Indonesia, Turkey and Zimbabwe. The high cost and logistical challenge of bringing foreign fellows to America for productive work ($20,000 per person for six months, not including administrative overhead for the Friendly fellows) is less appealing to some U.S. media developers. But Friendly argued that this type of fellowship was especially valuable because “these efforts immerse visiting journalists in American free press practices” and he found that America’s big-city dailies were more willing to accept foreign journalists than to give up their own staffers for extended sessions abroad.

American journalists got more involved after USIA official Marvin Stone created the International Media Fund in 1990 with money from the U.S. government's SEED (South East Europe Development) program. He enlisted American news organizations that otherwise would not, for reasons of independence, use grant money directly from the U.S. government. Other nonprofit private organizations followed suit.

Soon, hundreds of Americans fanned out into Russia, Eastern Europe and nearby countries, offering workshops, lectures and more ambitious long-term media projects. By the end of the decade, it seemed as if every American foundation, university and journalism trade association had a program in Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Moscow, Johannesburg or Bosnia.

U.S. government media development efforts generally followed the geography of U.S. foreign policy attention. Florida International University won a large government contract to help Central American journalists in the wake of U.S. military involvement in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Panama in the 1980's. In 1990 the spotlight landed on the former Soviet empire, where journalism was thawing out from the long Cold War. This is where the field of media development burgeoned and where most of the money still goes today, through government grants to Internews, IREX, and through Soros' Open Society Institute (OSI) foundations. In Africa and other regions, U.S. embassies in the 1980s helped local media with small grants which shrank during the 1990s as interest shifted to Russia, Eastern Europe and the Balkans. (8) "The Cold War is over and Africa lost," lamented the Nigerian ambassador to the United Nations in 1990. (9) Now there is increased U.S. donor attention to African media, much of it motivated by the fight to stem HIV/AIDS.

U.S. government interest in building journalism capacity in Africa, Asia and the Middle East remains sporadic, at best. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks aroused more U.S. government and ngo interest in building journalism capacity in the Muslim world. The virulently anti-American press in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East was thought to have contributed to the rise of Al Qaeda and other terrorist allies. In Afghanistan, USAID recently granted $1 million to Internews to revive independent broadcast media through the Afghan Media Resource Center (AMRC) which was founded by the Boston University School of Journalism in 1986, and which represents the largest number of trained non-Taliban Afghan television and radio broadcasters. Non-governmental media development organizations also are now busy training and reviving Afghan journalism, although the situation remains unsettled. (See pp. 68-70.)

While the bulk of American assistance during the past decade was devoted to the former Communist bloc and the Balkans, some smaller-scale, nonprofit groups such as the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ, formerly the Center for Foreign Journalists), the Freedom Forum and the International Women's Media Foundation (IWMF) engaged American and foreign journalists also in Latin America, Africa and Asia. These diverse ngos offered fellowships, exchanges, workshops, awards and other assistance, sometimes sponsored, in part, by pass-through U.S. government grants as well as the Knight, McCormick Tribune and other media foundations. Journalism rights organizations like the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Europeans' Article 19 stepped up support for journalists in peril, and fought for public access to information all around the globe.

The Americans, with their First Amendment tradition of a hands-off government relationship to the media, generally have not assisted media companies that continued to be run by foreign governments. The U.S. government's media development programs were designed to ease the transition from state-run media to private, independent media, as part of a larger mission of building democracy and civil society. (10) American ngo journalism support work also was directed in most cases to newly privatized or start-up "independent" media voices that in many places, had to be created from scratch.

All of this development has in some cases skewed the marketplace, aiding some news organizations over others that might equally have been worthy. In Bosnia and Kosovo, as well as other areas, there is no question that millions in Western journalism development money has made some contractors into media kingmakers. Yet this is not a fair argument against the practice of helping some media organizations over others, Internews' Persephone Miel explained. The small pot of advertising money in Russia, for example, has made it impossible for all the local television stations that wanted to do independent news to survive, she said. Helping some stations was better than letting them all sink.

Bill Siemering of Soros' OSI thinks it was a mistake for the U.S. government, through its contractors Internews and IREX, to sidestep such mixed public/private models as America's National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service, which might be more sustainable and better serve democratic culture in these transition societies than purely commercial media. USAID assessors in 1999 also concluded that NPR and PBS-style public service broadcasting was an "overlooked area" for American media support abroad. (11) European counterparts, with different traditions, had no compunction about supporting state-owned broadcasters or newspapers as well as independent media, or using government-subsidized media as models in the assisted countries.

DONOR MARKETPLACE DILEMMAS

In many instances, especially in the beginning, the trainers were well meaning but ineffective. Sometimes this was compounded by the problem that the journalists being trained couldn't use the help. Their managers didn't support them or they didn't agree with the training. Ethics and professionalism remain a stumbling block today, since many media owners are uninterested in public service or lack the capacity to pay journalists a living wage.

Mexico's president Vicente Fox has said he is ending the longtime government practice of "subsidizing" journalists, but it remains to be seen how this will work out. In Kenya, Transparency International exposed journalists who got free Korean cars because they "overlooked" certain stories. In Russia, another sting found that 95% of newspapers published, without checking, a press release announcing the opening of a major stereo store, which didn't actually exist; each press release had included a bogus $200 bonus coupon for the reporter. (12)

In Bosnia, a satellite dish donated for independent television use was hijacked by the very Serb nationalists that the new independent media were trying to challenge. It was then used to broadcast noxious propaganda. Questions about local misuse of money forced funding cutbacks at a Eurasia Foundation project in Belarus and management changes at RAPIC in Moscow.

The fast-growing commercial marketplace for media and advertising has not always been supportive of the democratic goals of free press and information access. In Ukraine, for example, improving the quality of newspapers often leads to the acquisition of those papers by corrupt forces. (13) Similarly, in Russia, the advertising market is too small to support hundreds of local TV stations, which produce local news and would like to be independent. (14) This means that "politically motivated sources of money, from business and governmental interests at all levels, continue to have far more influence in the media market than is desirable" said Persephone Miel of Internews.

The Case for Community Radio

Mission-oriented community radio stations are thriving in many regions. Radio 101 in Zabreb and B-92 in Serbia offer news and programming that reflects community values, according to Bill Siemering, a legend in American radio for creating National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" program. Siemering now helps local communities create their own radio stations, on behalf of George Soros's Open Society Institute. Rich and Suzi McClear, respected media developers who have done work for IREX, The German Marshall Fund, OSI and others, helped develop effective business plans for radio stations in Slovakia, Albania, and elsewhere. The U.S. public radio model "with strong modifications" has worked in many developing democracies, McClear said. "Depending on voluntary listener contributions for over 50% of income is not applicable overseas," Siemering noted. "No model can be effectively imported. However, there are values and principles that do work everywhere." South African community radio has been one of the most successful. Frances Fortune, director of the Talking Drum Studio in Freetown, Sierra Leone, is doing a good job developing radio throughout the region, Siemering said. Also in Freetown, owner and manager Andrew Kromah of SKY-FM (and KISS-FM in Bo), will receive an award in October, 2002 from ICFJ for his courageous exposés of corruption, under the moniker "Mr Owl."

Veran Matic, the director of Serbia's heroic B-92 radio station, says donor governments should avoid artificial ventures. "Only those initiatives which have taken root and become an integral part of the social fabric of the area in conflict stand a chance of yielding satisfactory results," he said at a 1999 conference. "Initiatives from the outside would surely fail, as they can never do more than mimic cultural patterns, this mimicry is obvious to the local community, and the information it carries is disregarded." (15)

Despite enormous difficulties and some discouraging setbacks, U.S. and European media development efforts continue to make a positive difference today. Improved media in Serbia, Mexico, Georgia, Ghana, Senegal and elsewhere have helped change the way those countries work. Many development sponsors are more sophisticated about what to do and what isn't effective. The old "parachute professor" model is still used by the U.S. government, but it is largely discredited by veteran media development organizations in the field. Now journalism schools, professional associations, radio networks and other practical projects are helping knit together an indigenous "enabling environment" for independent journalism in many countries where democracy is under attack. (16) An Internews "Public Expertise" Russia study funded by USAID argued that it is in governments' financial interest to cooperate with independent media, because they can save money on media subsidy costs. "We thought it would be controversial, but the government welcomed it," said Mark Koenig of USAID, which funded the study. (17)

The needs are great in virtually every region, as former Communist countries still struggle to establish democratic cultures, and as populations in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America remain cut off from basic information about their own governments and the rest of the world. The stakes are rising now since media are so important to acquiring and maintaining political power and since economic health is linked, in part, to information access and digital technologies. (18)

Today the field of media development--which is dominated by at least $50 million a year in US government grant money, and at least $20 million a year from Soros's funding and operating foundations, plus several millions more from diverse other sources--continues to expand around the world. The giant media development implementing organizations are Internews (19) and IREX, plus the web of Soros OSI foundations. While the scope of their work dwarfs the private projects, some smaller ngos do provide effective assistance that makes a real difference, such as the Knight Fellows/ICFJ work, the Centers for Independent Journalism and the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Projects still underway in Russia and the new republics that once made up the Soviet Union are more vital than ever, and sometimes dangerous. As new capitalist oligarchs with political ties to the ruling parties take over the "independent" media in Russia and other countries, the need for concerted action to win legal, policy and economic battles is clear. The local stakes are great, as Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze learned in October, 2001 when he tried to silence government corruption exposés on television. He had to dismiss his government after tens of thousands of people took to the streets to defend their beloved independent Rustavi-2 television. (20)

GEORGE SOROS' $450 MILLION NETWORK OF 32 FOUNDATIONS (21)

Aside from the U.S. and other governments, the largest financial contribution being made internationally to support democracy and independent media is probably made by Hungarian-born investor George Soros. The "mother ship" of all the Soros foundations is the Open Society Institute, established in New York City in 1993. OSI is a private operating and grant making foundation.

The complexity of Soros' philanthropic empire is daunting. It includes separate Open Society foundations in 28 countries, plus Kosovo and Montenegro, and two regional foundations, the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa and the Open Society Initiative for West Africa. (These two make grants in 27 African countries.) These locally-based foundations, plus several overlapping Soros international initiatives, have focused primarily on the former Communist bloc.

These networked foundations all participate, to some extent, in media projects. Major media efforts are administered by the Open Society Institute in New York and the Open Society Institute in Budapest. The Soros foundations' itemized media projects totaled about $20 million in 2000, but this does not adequately represent the Soros foundations' contributions to open, professional journalism. They view media development as organically linked to democracy development, and thus do not separate it out as a line item. The U.S. government and other foundations also have failed generally to maintain journalism capacity-building as a separate program or budget line item.

Together, all the Soros foundations spent $494.1 million in 2000, and this $450 to 500 million level is expected to continue for the next several years. This figure has grown from 1994 ($300 million) but lessened from the peak years of 1998 ($574.7 million) and 1999 ($560 million). Soros's philanthropies do not plan to expand the number of national or country foundations. In fact, George Soros has said he intends to support the foundations only until 2010. Most of these investments aim to develop in some fashion a democratic culture, providing an "enabling environment" (in Monroe Price's words) for independent journalism and public access to information.

The goal of all of Soros' philanthropy is to "establish a global alliance for open society." Because he plans to end funding his philanthropies in 2010, his foundations are working now to make their current work self-sustaining, with partnerships, spin-offs and other initiatives.

The Soros foundations expect to continue allocating 60% of their funds for projects in the former Soviet bloc countries, 20% in the U.S. and 20% on the rest of the world. Media initiatives singled out in the 2000 annual report as likely to win continued support are the Media Development Loan Fund, Internews, and a number of human rights organizations. Emphasis will be on serving the least advantaged. This will include support for Roma media, and strengthening the rule of law-including laws that affect journalists-in Central and Eastern Europe.

HOT NEW AREAS: INTERNET AND MEDIA POLICY

There is a "new media order" in the developed world, particularly after Sept. 11, according to Lee McKnight, of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Those with access to them go to their television sets for breaking news, then the Internet, and then the news filters back into print and television. With technological leapfrogging in Africa, Bangladesh and other places long considered cut off from technology, digital cross training for journalists should be considered virtually everywhere. Yet only a few of the existing media development groups are doing this kind of training. (22)

With Internet publishing, "the obsession with autocratic governments may be overblown" because their ability to censor information is reduced, said Crocker Snow, Jr., editor of the World Paper. Internet training gives a journalist "the potential to become a self-contained, independent news production company should his newspaper or broadcast outlet be arbitrarily closed or nationalized by a government hostile to the free flow of information," said David DeVoss, who was the resident advisor in Bosnia-Herzegovina for IREX's $2.5 million USAID print media development program. "In a single day a rogue government can wipe out years of (media development) work. In August, 2001 Belarus officials confiscated USAID computers given to the newspaper Volny Horad in the town of Krichev. Simultaneous with that seizure, the Belarusian Justice Ministry warned Belorusskaya Delovaya Gazeta against publishing information on pro-democracy political groups not registered with the government. In cases such as this, journalists skilled in digital editing and production could provide a fail safe conduit for the dissemination of unfettered news." (23)

Yet even the Internet is subject to a growing body of legal restrictions in some regions. Armed with studies which show a correlation between open media and economic development, (24) the World Bank Institute and USAID are considering a new initiative to promote open media policies. They are building on pro bono efforts by the American Bar Association's CEELI project, the Covington & Burling law firm, IFEX, Internews, IREX, The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Privacy International and many others.(25) In the media development field, policy work is both the most difficult and the most sensitive; much of the work to date is reactive, and the potential for impact is far from maximized. There is plenty of monitoring, but not enough local follow-through to build better policies for media and information access.

There is a better system for tracking violations of media rights than for tracking the development of media legislation. The BBC tries to monitor world media each week, but many governments don't publish even their final media laws. ICFJ's IJNet is a website funded by Soros's OSI to publish media laws as they emerge, but it is hard to keep it up to date with just a small staff in Washington. Bob Gillette, recently of IREX, believes it would be valuable to monitor changing laws on a regional basis. "It should be possible to identify an existing regional organization that becomes an active collector and repository of this information." Yet even in Bosnia, which is run by the international community, they can't keep track of new media laws, Gillette said. (26) He concluded that tax reform would do more for free media in some countries than anything else.

EPIC, Internews and others see this as a critical moment for preserving the open Internet, before more repressive policies are put into place. One major new U.S. government initiative is a $75 million USAID cooperative agreement called Dot.com, concerning Internet policy, access and distance education. (27) Even China is beginning to recognize that it has to allow more open media in order to participate in the global marketplace. "If you want to be part of the globalization of commerce, you have to be part of the globalization of communication," concluded David Hoffman of Internews. Experts believe that it is more effective for U.S. ngos to conduct media policy work as part of the field's traditional "capacity building" rather than expressing it as political engagement against repressive regimes.

FUNDING TRENDS

Funding has a vital impact on where media development will occur and what shape it takes. The U.S. government contracts with non-governmental institutions to do media development, in order to be consistent with the mission of establishing media independent from government. A more systematic approach to monitoring the media environment in each country is needed. IREX is developing a complex monitor of media conditions and Crocker Snow, Jr. of the World Paper and International Development Conference (IDC) consulting group, has developed an Information Society Index that also helps businesses measure a country's economic prospects based on media capacity and public access to information. The State Department's human rights reports contain a media dimension that also is a powerful tool for assessing media problems from country to country.

Freedom House offers a well-known, updated map of press freedom, which is used widely but gets mixed reviews from the field. Media indexes like Freedom House's, which declare some countries "bad" on media, must be used with care because they may antagonize governments that might otherwise tolerate U.S. media development.

New funding is starting to address the emerging Internet, media convergence and media policy areas. But old media still need much of the attention in developing democracies. Some of the smartest American money is being spent these days on developing community radio, which reaches mass audiences that otherwise would receive no news, especially in Africa, Indonesia, other parts of Asia, and Latin America.

Interest in funding media projects in former Communist Central Europe (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania) peaked in the late 90s, as media in some of these countries seemed to find their own legs. The Center for Independent Journalism in Prague, financed by Greenfield's Independent Journalism Foundation (IJF), was closed in 2000 and IJF opened a new center in Cambodia instead. But as recent Russian, Czech and Hungarian experiences with the political takeovers of "private" media show, this kind of departure may have been premature. (28) The areas receiving the most funding attention in 2002 continue to be Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, Russia, South Africa, the Caucuses, South Asia and Cambodia. Afghanistan and the Middle East are new hot spots for U.S. sponsored media training and development. South Africa is thick with American journalism trainers and developers. Cambodia also is popular for these projects because it offers relative freedom for media compared to its neighbors, so work can be done across its borders to help the embattled democratic activists in Myanmar (Burma), and the developing democracies of Vietnam and Thailand. (29)

USAID is more interested than ever in supporting media development, David Black said. (30) The World Bank also is expressing new interest in independent media as a factor in economic development. At the same time, some private foundations are being forced by financial setbacks to retrench. The Freedom Forum has cut 60% of its programs, including 100% of its international programs, due to a combination of reduced resources in the economic downturn and a redirection of priorities to the new Newseum location on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. The McCormick Tribune Foundation, which lost over $500 million in stock value after Sept. 11, has refocused its work more narrowly to press freedom issues, and the level of its media development support is expected to drop significantly from its current $6 million a year, including $2 million in the Americas.

RESULTS?

The accumulated impact of this extensive democracy support, including specific media development efforts, has made a crucial difference in some countries. For example, the estimated $40 million in U.S. public and private democracy programs in Serbia from mid-1999 to 2000, along with complementary efforts by Western Europe and Canada, are credited with helping the Serbs topple Milosevic in September 2000. "Western aid underwrote much of the independent media in the country, helping ensure the expansion of an enterprising network of independent radio and television stations, and the survival of many independent magazines and newspapers. The independent media played a major role in challenging Milosevic's efforts to control public information," international lawyer Thomas Carothers wrote in a policy paper for the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. (31)

However, the U.S. contributions to the anti-Milosevic campaign were only helping a local movement to remove him from power, Carothers found. "Even when a democracy aid campaign is extensive and sophisticated, it is at most a facilitator of locally rooted forces for political change, not the creator of them," he concluded.

Beyond that one example, it is fair to say that tens of thousands of journalists have been "trained" in the former Communist world, Latin America, and Africa; hundreds of independent television, newspaper, radio and Internet news organizations have been nurtured, and more information has been made available to populations in transition societies than they would have had without America's public and private media support efforts.

At the same time, other forces have had an equal or greater impact on the ability of media in transition societies to be independent and viable. The most significant factors are the "enabling culture" of civil society-the economic environment, political culture and prevailing media policies-which improved in some regions over the past decade only to grow worse in others. (32)

Among the media development organizations, there remain issues of competitiveness, overlap, competency and turf. There is a famous rivalry between the giant U.S. government contractors, Internews and IREX, even though in the field, they often work effectively side by side. Much media development has been undertaken around the world by the legions of media missionaries who mobilized in the 1990s and who still are active today. But as politicians continue to enact repressive legislation and market forces bedevil the best journalists everywhere, much more remains to be done. "We have failed at multilateral issues because there are too many players who want to lead. There is a tremendous competitiveness out there at the moment, whether from OSI or others, and this is a serious issue…A broader coalition is needed," said Frank Vogl of Transparency International.

These challenges surely are inevitable, in a field that has grown so large in such a short time. As Whayne Dillehay of ICFJ concluded, "There's more than enough work for us all to do."