Media monitoring is, in a sense, the precondition for much else that has been discussed regarding media regulation during elections and the development of best practices. Without a serious and systematic picture of what the media are actually producing, any discussion about standards or policies can be little more than anecdotal.

Yet, despite the obvious importance of media monitoring, it is only fairly recently that it has become a standard practice in the management of elections.

Who monitors the media?

Three main groups undertake monitoring of the media during elections:

• Electoral management bodies;
• International electoral observation missions;
• Non-governmental organisations and other civic bodies.

The purpose in each instance is rather different. Electoral administrators will normally monitor the media in order to determine whether they have adhered to the regulations or laws governing media behaviour during elections. If EMBs have a direct regulatory function, they will use their monitoring findings to make sure that media comply with the required standards.

International observers are also concerned with media compliance with local rules and laws. However, they are also more broadly concerned with monitoring the contribution that the media make to a free and fair election. They also, of course, have no powers of enforcement and will usually withhold their monitoring findings until after the election has taken place. The value of media monitoring by international electoral observation missions is that it integrates the question of fair media coverage into an overall assessment of whether the election was fairly conducted.

Non–governmental organisations and other civil society groups will have more freedom in the way that they can monitor election coverage. They can devise more varied methodologies to determine different types of media bias. (EMBs and international observers, by contrast, are likely to be restricted to a simple analysis of the allocation of time to parties and candidates.) Civil society monitors, unlike international observers, can also make their findings public whenever they choose, not being restricted until after the election has been held. They can communicate their findings directly to the media. This means that civil society monitoring can often be used as part of an effort to raise journalistic standards while the election campaign is still going on.

The efforts of these different monitoring groups can be complementary and even co-ordinated. In some cases, as in Malawi’s first multi-party election in 1994, an electoral management body may take notice of civil society media monitoring and use its powers to try to make media coverage fairer. In other instances, as in South Africa in 1999, the EMB may hire a non-governmental monitoring group to be its eyes and ears.

Likewise, in the Ukrainian presidential elections of 2004 there was media monitoring from both intergovernmental groups and local human rights and media freedom organisations. The local groups were able to publish their findings regularly (and on a broader set of issues), with their conclusions bolstered by those of the international monitors.

What do media monitors do?

The intellectual origins of media monitoring are to be found in the development of academic media studies, such as the work of the Glasgow Media Group. Academic media analysis, which is primarily geared to the sophisticated media of developed industrial societies, tends to focus in large measure on what it calls "discourse analysis". This is primarily concerned with the hidden messages conveyed by the language selected - or the visual language of television and the subtle or subliminal impact that these can have on the viewer's understanding or interpretation of a subject. Discourse analysis is certainly an element of media monitoring in elections. But usually the emphasis will be on two other standards that are easier to apprehend and then to measure. These are usually described as "quantitative analysis" and "qualitative analysis". The first is the simplest, the least controversial and often has the greatest impact. It simply entails counting and measuring election coverage in the media - number and length of items devoted to different parties, length in column inches, timing and number of direct access programmes and so on. The amount of coverage each party or candidate receives is usually the first criterion that will be looked at in order to evaluate allegations of bias.

"Qualitative analysis" is, as the name suggests, an approach that measures the quality of the coverage that parties and candidates receive. This applies primarily to news coverage, although it should also be applied to voter education. A qualitative evaluation will look at the language used and the message conveyed - not the hidden messages of discourse analysis - and use this to "qualify" the quantitative measure. It may not be very useful to say that Party X has received a certain percentage of news coverage, if a large part of that coverage is biased in its content. Inevitably the measurement of bias is more subjective than simply counting the minutes, seconds or column inches accorded to each candidate. But there are ways of minimizing potential bias on the part of the monitor. One is to count and attribute the sources of a story.

Media monitoring has become a common feature of elections since the mid-1990s. There has been a convergence of methodology among those groups carrying out media monitoring regularly, whether in partnership with national NGOs, with intergovernmental observer teams or on behalf of EMBs. International NGOs such as the European Institute for the Media, along with national organizations such as the Osservatorio di Pavia (Italy), MEMO98 (Slovakia), the Media Monitoring Project (South Africa) and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (United States) have popularized easy, effective and surprisingly subtle monitoring methodologies and created a large pool of people familiar with their use.