Pact Madagascar, an international NGO promoting democratic development, and Multi-Service Information Systems (MSIS), a Malagasy NGO, monitored the television and radio media coverage of the presidential candidates to provide feedback to journalists and raise public awareness of the media’s election coverage. By using the internationally recognized media monitoring tools developed by MEMO 98 and with financial and technical support from the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), MSIS and Pact worked with the media to evaluate media coverage and publish the results for the Malagasy public.

This initiative aimed at assessing the quality of information disseminated by the media to educate the Malagasy electorate and assist them in making a well informed decision on election day.

The objectives of the 2006 Presidential Election Pact/MSIS Media Monitoring were to:
• provide a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the 2006 Presidential Election media coverage
• supply the media, political contestants, citizens, and international community with data to assess the objectivity of media in the election process.
• encourage journalists, editors and media outlet owners to observe standards of balanced reporting
• motivate citizens to better understand the role of the media and advocate for positive changes to the media laws

Based on the relevant criteria, including their coverage of politics in Madagascar, the following nine media outlets were selected into the media monitoring exercise – TVM, RNM, RDB, MBS, TV Plus, M3TV, Soatalily, FMA, and F Plus. The monitoring exercise ran for the whole period of the official media campaign, from 12 November through to the start of the `media silence` on 1 December. It focused on the prime time - from 1800 to 000 on the national level and from 1800 to 2100 for the provincial stations.

Nine journalism students from the University of Antananarivo – Ankatso were trained by MEMO 98 (Rasto Kuzel and Marek Mracka) to monitor the broadcasts using specially designed monitoring forms. The methodology qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed the media content (see more in the final report)

Attachments:
Final report