Non-governmental media monitoring projects were active in both Malawi's multi-party elections of the 1990s. Interest in monitoring the media systematically was stimulated by the strong bias shown by the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation in the referendum of June 1993, which was to determine whether the country would move from a single-party to a multi-party political system. Although the vote was in favour of change, there were fears that heavy bias in the public media would have an impact on the outcome of the multi-party elections scheduled for the following year. At the time the MBC was the only broadcaster in the country. However, the observation of bias was entirely anecdotal. Nobody had done the serious business of measuring - and thereby demonstrating - the alleged unfairness of the MBC's coverage. In particular, none of the United Nations team who were supervising the elections had any idea what messages were being conveyed in MBC's broadcasts in Chichewa, the national language.
ARTICLE 19, the International Centre Against Censorship, based in London, had been campaigning for freedom of expression in Malawi for many years. (See http://www.article19.org) The country had a particularly elaborate legal framework for censorship, most of which remained in place as the 1994 elections approached. The highly restrictive nature of Malawi's one-party regime meant that there had been no opportunity for civic activism, so there were no non-governmental or community organizations working on freedom of expression or human rights issues. ARTICLE 19 decided to set up a media monitoring project, recruiting a prominent Malawian human rights activist and former political prisoner, Edge Kanyongolo, in a senior position. He was one of the founders of a new human rights group, the Civil Liberties Committee, and the hope was that the expertise he acquired in the course of the project would be passed on to that body.
Kanyongolo taught law at the University of Malawi in Zomba and the monitors who were recruited were all students there. It was reckoned that they were among the very few Malawians with the experience of carrying out structured research activities. The fact that they were all in one educational institution made issues of organization and discipline easy to resolve. Monitoring was conducted in a language laboratory on campus. Most students lived on campus or within easy reach, so very few monitoring shifts were missed. ARTICLE 19 invited staff from the Media Monitoring Project in South Africa to train the monitors initially. (See http://www.sn.apc.org/mmp/) In time, however, it would become clear that media monitoring in South Africa and Malawi was a rather different matter. Whereas large swathes of the South African media were privately owned, often by multinational companies and their biases were complex and subtle, the Malawian media consisted in effect of just two sectors: a government-controlled broadcaster and daily newspaper and a profusion of new, privately owned newspapers. Most private papers were scrappily produced and appeared irregularly. They tended to emerge and then disappear with bewildering speed. The professional and journalistic standards of the Malawian media were almost uniformly low and the biases displayed were not, for the most part, very subtle or difficult to identify.
From the outset the media monitoring project produced weekly reports that were circulated to all relevant stakeholders: government, electoral commission, UN supervisory team, political parties, foreign diplomats and the media themselves. The latter reported on the project's findings, placing them in the public arena. Since the publicly funded media were so heavily biased in favour of the government, criticism from the monitoring project drew the inevitable response that the monitors were supporting the opposition. It was an allegation that could only be refuted by painstaking documentation of the monitors' findings.
Media monitoring in Malawi succeeded to some extent in achieving an improvement in the quality of coverage at the MBC. There were two main reasons for this. First, many broadcasters themselves were sympathetic to the new wave of popular democratic sentiment in the country, even though they had worked for many years as one-party propagandists. They wanted to change the way that they practised journalism and were happy to take the media monitoring reports as guidance. The second and decisive reason for the improvement was the independence and vigour of the electoral commission, which studied the monitoring findings closely and obliged the MBC to take note.
Five years later Malawi held its second multi-party elections. In the interim the first private radio stations had been licensed and a Communications Act passed that ostensibly guaranteed the independence of the MBC from the government of the day. NGOs in Malawi were hardly any stronger than in 1994 and ARTICLE 19 returned, after consultations with local partners, to revive the media monitoring project. The monitors' findings were disappointingly similar to the early days of the 1994 election campaign. The difference, however, was that there was no discernible improvement in fairness as the campaign progressed, as there had been in 1994. The new democratic government kept MBC broadcasters on just as tight a leash as the old one-party rulers had done. But there was no new democratic spirit abroad in 1999. And crucially, the government had dismissed the electoral commission only months before the 1999 polls, replacing it with members who were generally regarded to be more sympathetic to those in power. Certainly the new commission failed to act on the media monitors' findings as its predecessor had done in 1994.
This did not mean, however, that the media monitors had wasted their time in 1999. If the work of the project in 1994 played an important part in subsequent legal reforms allowing greater pluralism, the final report of the 1999 project may yet help to give substance to those reforms in practice. The 1999 report was able to document government use of public resources to spread disinformation about the opposition parties and was used by the opposition in a legal challenge to the election results. The findings caused considerable public disquiet that may be reflected in pressure on the government to liberalize the publicly funded media.120
