Media Monitoring

The monitoring of ethical performance and quality of the media provides not only the MCT with data for designing its interventions based on actual needs, but also media houses and journalists with information on how to improve their quality and services to the public. Issues of quality, such as sourcing, gender and accuracy will therefore be monitored.  Media monitoring will be expanded.

In the past years, MCT monitored only print media. However, as mentioned above, radio is still the ubiquitous medium in Tanzania, while TV is also a critical medium for urbanites as well as the movers and shakers in society, people who make decisions that affect lives. MCT will therefore strategically monitor radio, TV and print media during 2017-2020, by outsourcing the media monitoring to a competent firm.

Monitoring reports will be shared with media houses, and an annual report will be compiled and published. Where critical quality and ethical issues that require instant intervention will be noted by MCT staff, phone calls, press releases and press conferences will be called for interface with media practitioners.

Gender as Cross-Cutting Issue

Gender is still an issue in the media. The MCT baseline study for the past Strategy carried out in 2013 also included a separate media content analysis whose aim was to measure the level of quality improvement of Tanzanian media, on the backdrop of MCT’s ethics training interventions. 81% of the sampled articles had not even one female source, a measure of journalism inadequacy on the gender agenda. In this 2017-2020 period, gender will be mainstreamed in our interventions as a matter of principle. Past strategic periods gender outputs such as the Gender in Media Policy, Gender Code of Ethics, Gender Reporting manual, Children Reporting manual etc. will be reviewed, reprinted, and widely disseminated in media houses, press clubs and schools of journalism with the aim of assisting journalists to report with the gender lens.