Sudan Media and Elections Consortium

This report provides the findings of the media monitoring activities in the period from16 April to 4 May 2010. This is the sixth media monitoring report published by the Sudan Media and Elections Consortium (SMEC). The Sudan Media and Elections Consortium (SMEC) was established to implement a Media and Elections project in Sudan. One of the main activities of the SMEC is media monitoring of Sudanese media’s election coverage.

The media monitoring takes place all over Sudan with two main joint media monitoring units, one in Khartoum and one in Juba. There are also parallel media monitoring units set up in seven states. The media monitoring units commenced their activities on 13 February coinciding with the beginning of the election campaign and will continue until the end of May in order to assess post-election coverage and the coverage of election re-runs in several states. The SMEC carries out media monitoring of four TV stations, seventeen radio channels and thirteen newspapers on a daily basis.

All selected media are monitored according to a methodological approach created in 1995 and based on content analysis. The monitoring of election and political coverage is based on both quantitative and qualitative analysis and aims to observe and assess the extent to which media provide fair and balanced coverage of politicians and other stakeholders. The project also monitors hate speech or inflammatory language to assess whether the media acted as agents of pacification or rather contributed to increase any potential tensions related to elections.

In the period from 16 April – 4 May most findings were in line with the findings of previous reports: the main format used by media to channel (post) election news and political actors was the news format, and NCP and SPLM remained the main actors covered in the media.

As during the election days and in the first days after the elections, there was a low number of hate speech cases in this latest reporting period with most cases found in print media. Politicians and parties were in most cases the sources and the targets of hate speech. Download full report here