News Media Landscape in a Fragile State: Professional Ethics Perceptions in a Post-Ba'athist Iraq

Rethinking professional autonomy: Autonomy to develop and to publish news in Mexico and Colombia

“…Few studies have explored autonomy in democracies with severe anti-press violence, despite the prevalence of such countries. In Iraq, after elections began, Relly et al (2015) found training in liberal journalism norms and external pressures, including violence, significantly predicted conflict-of-interest avoidance, which is linked to autonomy. González de Bustamante and qualitative study found that cross-media organizations provided support for autonomy in Northern Mexico.…”

The enigma of news media development with multi-pronged ‘capture’: The Afghanistan case

“…This research utilized the critical juncture of the withdrawal of intensive foreign support and other factors to address the overarching research question that explores the impact of external interventions in the Afghan context and how journalists there perceive the current news media ecosystem. Our findings provide a potential framework for future research in conflict or post-conflict zones that have received large amounts of media development assistance in recent years, for there has been little research in this area outside of the post-Soviet states and satellite countries (Berger, 2010;Relly et al, 2015aRelly et al, , 2015b.…”

“…This research builds on early critical work focused on one-way information flow from industrialized to developing nations (Nordenstreng and Schiller, 1993;Schiller, [1971] 1992), 'party colonization' of the news media (Bajomi-Lázár, 2014), perspectives on post-imperialism (Boyd- Barrett, 2010;Schiller, 2010;Straubhaar, 2010), measurements of news freedom (Becker and Vlad, 2011), and trajectories of former authoritarian or autocratic countries that have undergone news media development (Bajomi-Lázár, 2014;Mungiu-Pippidi, 2008;Sparks, 2008;Voltmer, 2006Voltmer, , 2013. Although governments around the world spend up to half a billion dollars (US) annually in journalism development training globally (Kaplan, 2012;Myers, 2009;Ricchiardi, 2011), little research has examined how these imports are integrated, or received, into established or nascent media systems in other countries with significant cultural differences from the West and that are in continuous conflict (Taylor and Napoli, 2003;Relly et al, 2015b). We conducted this qualitative study in Kabul, the Afghan capital, with an attempt to 'de-westernize' the research approach, which generally requires avoiding the use of theories and methods that are largely utilized in the West (Waisbord and Mellado, 2014).…”

Hierarchy of influences on transitional journalism – Corrupting relationships between political, economic and media elites

“…However, in some contexts morally and ethically, problematic behaviour can become accustomed in journalism practice. For example, in post-Ba’athist Iraq, most journalists had no ethical issues about paying a source for information (Relly et al, 2015). Örnebring (2016) refers to ‘the practice of taking money to write puff pieces for business or political interests without indicating that the content is paid for’ as systemic in the CEE countries (p. 5).…”