Democratic Republic of Congo Media Sustainability Index (MSI)
March 8, 2012
About the MSI
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 | Africa | Asia | Europe & Eurasia | Middle East & North Africa
Download Complete Demcratic Republic of Congo Chapter (PDF): 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2006/7 | 2006/7 (français)
MSI Democratic Republic of Congo - 2010 Introduction
Overall Country Score: 1.80
Four years have passed since the first presidential and legislative elections in 2006 ended years of destabilizing rebellions and armed conflicts, and one year remains until the next elections in 2011. Security in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) remains a concern, and destabilitzation is a real possibility.
A sense of insecurity has heightened since the assassination of a prominent human rights activist, Floribert Chebeya Bahizire, chief executive office of La Voix des sans Voix (VSV; the voice of the Voiceless), in Kinshasa on June 1, 2010. The murder chilled human rights advocates and media professionals alike. Journalists can no longer muster the courage to cover so-called sensitive stories. Instead, they file "rent-paying" stories that merely help them to get by financially. All the panelists admitted that self-censorship driven by fear is now the greatest threat to the right to inform and be informed in the DRC. Accordingly, the indicator concerning professional journalism scored lowest in this year's MSI.
Other incidents stemmed from insecurity in the eastern provinces. Chebeya Bankome, a media professional, was assassinated in April 2010. In another incident, a journalist accused of "treason" was arrested and thrown into jail for five months because he had published a press release of the Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Rwanda (FDLR), a Rwandan rebel group based in the mountains of the eastern DRC. The release, taken from a website, accused the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (AFDRC) of atrocities against civilians. Congolese authorities accused Radio France Internationale (RFI) of a smear campaign against the AFDRC fighting the FDLR rebels and halted the FM broadcasting arm of RFI for over a year across all of the DRC.
After these incidents and other violations of the freedom of the press, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) and Journaliste en Danger (JED) sent an open letter to the president to point out the deterioration of working conditions for journalists and the decline of freedom of speech. Panelists recalled several cases where journalists were assassinated, threatened, or arrested and discussed the difficulties foreign media face in a consistently tainted and unsafe environment.
Nonetheless, the compiled scores from all panelists show that the weakest link in the Congolese media system is the financial instability of press companies, which must deal with an environment unfriendly to business and being managed like small, family corner shops. The majority of Congolese journalists are either paid badly or not paid at all, due to the economic precariousness of their employers. They are sitting ducks for manipulation and corruption.
The panelists pointed out that there is a direct connection between the "professionalism of journalists" (measured by Objective 2 of the MSI) and the economic sustainability of press companies (Objective 4). "The ultimate guarantor of the freedom and independence of a journalists is his/her employer, who must secure the conditions that will shelter him/her from manipulation and corruption," one panelist noted.
The Democratic Republic of Congo study was coordinated by, and conducted in partnership with, Journaliste en Danger, Kinshasa.
