In reading Tom's excellent post on CIMA's new report on independent media development efforts, I was struck yet again by how little we know about the impact of media development assistance - and how little we know about what we know. For instance, it's commonly held that donors need to be able to understand the impact of their assistance, to make sure their dollars are being spent wisely and in the right place. But how should we determine this?
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In the developed world, radio is a more or less dying medium. In the age of iPods, who needs to switch on a radio to listen to music? Much less to listen to political talk, which you get anywhere from your local newspaper (preferably online) to cable television (also online, of course). Nevertheless, radio has a curious position in the political realm, in particular in developing countries, and to some extent also in the Western world..jpg)
Anne-Katrin
Having spent a considerable part of my professional and academic life thinking and writing about the public sphere, it still amazes me how nebulous this concept is, and how difficult it is to be clear about what we mean when we talk about "the public sphere." Academics write multi-volume books on this issue, and justifiably so: The public sphere is a constitutive element of democracy. Without it, citizens would not have a space in which to develop and articulate "public will," and no means to influence political decision making. 
Roumeen Islam is manager of the World Bank Institute's Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Division. She is an economist by training and, I might add, by conviction. But to anybody who cares seriously about the role of the mass media in development, Roumeen is much admired in a particular capacity: as someone who has made a sterling contribution to how the media is viewed within international development. Although media systems and their impact on development are not the only things that have preoccupied her - right now she is leading major work on international trade indicators, amongst others - she has done as much as anybody I know to put an institutional view of the media on the development agenda. 
I was delighted, yesterday to stumble across 
New policy and practice fields need intellectual energy; otherwise they don’t go anywhere quickly. Those promoting the new fields need to be producing justificatory essays, applied research, good practice manuals, policy briefs, evaluations, articles in refereed journals...and blogs too! They should be bombarding policy makers with all kinds of output of good quality; and they should be organizing the field as a serious discipline. I am happy to see that the role of the media in development is attracting more intellectual energy. 
I have been forced to think about the role of the news media in the governance reform agenda a lot in the last few weeks. First, CommGAP had 
Tom Jacobson, Professor and Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the School of Communications and Theater, Temple University. 
Caroline Jaine, 
Taeku Lee, Associate Professor of Political Science and Visiting Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. 
