Non-governmental organizations have a broad range of reasons for monitoring media coverage of an election. Their primary aim is likely to be the same as that of an electoral management body or international observation mission: to ensure that news coverage is fair and professional and that different parties and candidates have access to the media.

Beyond this primary aim, the aims of NGOs (or of other non-governmental monitors) may be more complex. They may be concerned, for example, with the content of electoral coverage. What topics do media reports cover? How far do these reflect the particular agendas of parties or candidates? Is electoral debate portrayed in a professional and dispassionate manner or do the media inflame partisan sentiments by their language or the style of their coverage?

Do the media actually meet the information needs of voters (an obvious question, but one that is perhaps asked too infrequently)? Are the positions of parties and candidates evaluated from viewpoint of the voter – see Voter’s Voice Reporting – or are the media complicit with the candidates in the uncritical presentation of their policies? Are the media playing an effective educative role? Do they tell voters what they need to know about where, how and why to vote?

How far are the interests and voices of minority or marginalized groups reflected in the media? Are women’s voices being adequately heard in the election campaign through the media? If not, why not? Are the media reflecting social gender bias uncritically, or are they making an effort to challenge it?

The range of issues that non-governmental media monitors have tackled is broad. Seldom is a media monitoring operation going to be able to address all these issues. What they can do, however, is to being their particular expertise to bear upon particular aspects of media coverage.

Most often this area of expertise will be in the area of the media itself. NGOs concerned with media freedom and with professional standards are most often engaged in monitoring. The purpose may be both to defend the media against political interference, whether from governments or private proprietors. Or it may be to promote professionalism in coverage.

At the minimum the published findings of media monitors may influence the quality of media coverage. Sometimes, as in Mozambique in 1994, the dialogue between monitors and journalists may go a step further. The news room of Radio Mozambique used to hold a weekly meeting to discuss the monitors' observations, decide whether they agreed with them or not and make plans for improvements. The improvement in the balance of radio coverage - away from heavy bias to the ruling party - was measurable over the campaign period.

In Tanzania’s 2000 elections, the media monitoring project was initiated by the Media Council, a voluntary professional body, in conjunction with other NGOs concerned with media freedom and professionalism. The project began with a conference, attended by representatives of the main media, which drew up a code of conduct for election coverage. The purpose of monitoring was explicitly to examine whether coverage complied with the standards that the media themselves had agreed upon. Inevitably, media houses often disputed the findings of the monitors. But they proved ready to engage in dialogue, which can only have benefited the quality of coverage.

On other occasions, the relationship between non-governmental monitors and media has been more difficult. Hostility between government media and non-governmental monitors is common. The latter are accused of promoting their own quasi-political agenda. Sometimes private media houses exhibit a similar reaction – for example in Moldova in 2005 – questioning the qualifications and bona fides of a monitoring group that produced critical findings.

On occasions, monitoring groups will address other issues too.

A good example of this broader focus came in media monitoring of the Ukrainian presidential election in 2004. One non-governmental group, Equal Access, carried out a lengthy and comprehensive monitoring that addressed the sole issue of the media access allocated to the different candidates. In parallel, two other organisations, the Institute of Mass Communication and the Kharkiv Human Rights Group, ran a monitoring project that addressed other issues in addition to the allocation of time and space to candidates. They looked at coverage of issues of particular concern to minority ethnic groups – including Crimean Tatars – and at the representation of women in election coverage. Their findings were scarcely surprising – under-reporting of minority concerns and a low frequency of women’s voices as news sources – but they provide important baseline information if these issues are to be tackled in future.