About the MSI
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IREX designed the MSI to measure the strength and viability of any country's media sector. The MSI considers all the factors that contribute to a media system—the quality of journalism, effectiveness of management, the legal environment supporting freedom of the press, and more—to arrive at scores on a scale ranging between 0 and 4. These scores represent the strength of the media sector components and can be analyzed over time to chart progress (or regression) within a country. Additionally, countries or regions may be compared to one another. IREX currently conducts the MSI in 80 countries, and began studying Africa in 2006.
MSI Overview [8] | Africa [9] | Asia [10] | Europe & Eurasia [11] | Middle East & North Africa [12]
MSI Methodology [13]
Download Complete Côte d'Ivoire Chapter (PDF): 2012 [14] | 2010 [15] | 2009 [16] | 2008 [17] | 2006/7 [18]| 2006/7 (français) [19]
MSI Côte D'Ivoire-2012 Introduction
Overall Country Score: 2.21
The general elections in 2010, which were supposed to extricate Côte d’Ivoire from the crisis in which it had been plunged since September 19, 2002, instead exacerbated tensions and led to a post-electoral crisis of unprecedented proportions in this country. An official count estimated the number of people who died during the crisis at 3,000.
Throughout the entire election campaign, the protagonists found themselves in two very distinct camps. On the one hand, there were the supporters of the incumbent president, Laurent Gbagbo, under the banner of The Presidential Majority, and on the other, those who take inspiration from the first Ivorian president, grouped together in the Rally of Houphouetists for Democracy and Peace (RHDP), who support Alassane Ouattara. The mostly partisan press was similarly divided.
The media were a hotly contested topic during both the 10-year crisis that shook Côte d’Ivoire and the more recent post-electoral crisis. The organization that controls radio and television broadcasting (CNCA) took up the cause of the incumbent president’s camp, regularly doling out punishments to oppositionist local radio stations but even more so to international radio and television outlets. The announcement of the victory of the opposition candidate, Ouattara, by the Independent Electoral Commission led to a statement from the CNCA that ordered “the immediate suspension of the signals of all foreign radio and television international news stations contained in the Canal+ Horizons cluster.” This press release, widely distributed by the public television station, claimed that it was a question of “maintaining the badly shaken social peace” in the country. This announcement was followed by another proclaiming the closing of the borders by the army.
This restriction on citizens’ freedom of information had been preceded by a serious infringement of their freedom of speech. Indeed, at the request of the minister of the interior, the industry regulator, the Telecommunications Agency of Côte d’Ivoire, ordered “the suspension of the internal composition, transmission, or reception of SMS, inbound and outbound, on all mobile networks operating within the national territory” from October 31 to November 2, 2010.
Despite the regressions in certain areas resulting from the post-election crisis, there have been some positive notes. The growing respect for freedom of speech and media pluralism in Côte d’Ivoire is evident in the flourishing of publications that compete every morning, filling up the shelves of the newsstands. Overall, panelists pointed to progress in the media sector. However, media coverage by the private press is generally very partisan. During the election campaign, journalists repeatedly thumbed their noses at the rules of the profession, choosing instead to be political actors with no respect at all for the principles laid down in their freely adopted code of conduct.