Electoral management bodies may monitor media coverage for a number of reasons:

• To determine whether the law or regulations on access to the media are being respected – for example, in the allocation and timing of free direct access or advertising slots, the observance of “reflection periods”, respect for regulations on content of advertising and direct access and so on.
• To review more broadly whether political parties and candidates are receiving fair access and coverage, for example in news coverage.
• To identify any emerging issues relating to electoral management or the conduct of the campaign that the EMB itself may have to address.
• To see how the activities of the EMB itself are being reported.

The first two of these aims will entail gathering extensive quantitative data - in effect, a full-scale media monitoring project. The other two could be achieved by a more casual and non-systematic review of media coverage, of a type that the EMB may anyway conduct as a matter of routine.

As experience of media monitoring grows and methodologies are more widely disseminated, it has become more common for EMBs (or other regulatory bodies) to contract outside experts to monitor the media. These may be university media studies or other social science departments or non-governmental organisations. The shift can be observed, for example, In South Africa. In 1994, media monitoring was the responsibility of a specialised regulatory body, the Independent Media Commission, established specifically for the duration of the election campaign. By the next elections, in 1999, the broadcasting regulator contracted the non-governmental Media Monitoring Project to monitor on its behalf.

The advantage of contracting outside expertise is clearly that it reduces the administrative burden on the EMB (at a time when other pressures are going to be at their maximum). There are, however, two potential disadvantages, which will be of varying significance depending on other circumstances.

The first potential disadvantage of contracting out is that the media and political parties may not perceive the monitoring findings as being authentically those of the EMB. If the EMB needs to act upon them, the findings may be regarded as a basis for negotiation rather than authoritative. Some EMBs have concluded that setting up their own media monitoring unit for the duration of the election period is a preferable option.

The second potential disadvantage is that the EMB will not develop its own expertise on media issues. Given that many EMBs tend to be inward looking and rather conservative in their dealings with the media, encouraging media literacy among the institution’s staff may have broader benefits. In the long term – given that elections are recurrent events – developing in-house expertise may also be more cost-effective.