Introduction (efficacy of MediaDev responses)

Effectiveness of media development responses

An academic perspective

“How can we better design media development programmes to keep pace with the times? Media are really in the hot seat for why there is so much information pollution. Why isn't the media more effective as a tool of countering disinformation? That's a bigger conversation that we should have.” (Academic)

A donor perspective

Government aid agencies have to approach this issue with a certain level of humility. Collaboration, knowledge sharing and nurturing of the evidence of how and when disinformation responses are effective is essential.

“We haven't cracked the code on how to do this. [...] It's a pretty wide-open space. We don't have any Bible to turn to, there is no long track record of practice, no extensive evidence base, a lot of that evidence and work has only been generated in the last couple of years.”

“I live with a lot of uncertainty about what we do or what we're funding and whether or not it works. Because of donor implementer dynamics, it's not always possible to have spaces like this, to be frank, and honest with each other about failure or negligible impact of the different kinds of interventions that people are doing.” (Donor)

Other donor representatives expressed confidence in supporting fact-checking, investigative journalism, and media literacy as a way to support governance goals. They did, however, want more evidence about how effective it was and how such interventions could be improved.

“Are they effectively changing the norms around our consumption of disinformation? Or are they blunting the impact of disinformation?” (Donor)

A practitioner perspective

There was broad consensus that media development responses to disinformation need to work with other areas of development:

Some examples were shared where media play a convening role to bring communities together to discuss issues around trust, truth and misinformation. These will be added to the case studies section of the literature review:

Disinformation

Coordination and coalition building

Emphasising “Doing no harm” over being "effective"

A donor representative explained why they had decided to emphasize the principle of “doing no harm” rather than being "effective" with regards to countering disinformation programs.

The 'do no harm' principle is important in terms of strategic guidance for countering disinformation as it is an essential part of the discussion around how journalism can build trust with audiences.

Reframing the discussion on disinformation to focus resources on support for journalism

Some participants made the case that focusing on disinformation can move priorities away from considering the wider information ecosystem and how quality journalism can be “scaled up” and “what can be done for journalism”, especially local journalism:

How to make the case for journalism support

Media development actors and researchers were encouraged to use the connection/correlation between high levels of media capture, low levels of quality journalism and the increased impact of misinformation as a justification and argue for supporting independent public service media as an effective response to disinformation.

For more on this see "Support to journalism" in "2. Responses aimed at producers and distributors."

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