Senegal Media Sustainability Index (MSI)
April 24, 2013
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.
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Download Complete Senegal Chapter (PDF): 2012 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2006/7 | 2006/7 (français)
MSI Senegal-2012 Introduction
Overall Country Score: 2.02
In 2012, the major political event in Senegal was the presidential election, the tenth since the country’s independence in 1960, which elected the republic’s president for a term of seven years. The election was seen by many observers as the most turbulent in Senegal’s history because of the many acts of violence that marred it: more than a dozen deaths, many injured, and incidents of unprecedented vandalism against public and private property.
The cause of this violence was a highly contested interpretation of the number of presidential terms authorized by the new Senegalese Constitution (passed by referendum in 2001), at the initiative of the former president, Abdoulaye Wade, upon his ascension to power in 2000. This new constitution sets the number of presidential terms at two.
Since President Abdoulaye Wade, first elected in 2000 and re-elected in 2007, wanted to run for another term, the opposition political parties, civil society, and voters hostile to this candidacy came together under the banner of a movement known as M23. They viewed his candidacy as illegal since, if successful, a third term would violate the 2001 constitution.
Nevertheless, the election commenced with Wade remaining on the ballot as a candidate. After the first round of the presidential election, a second round was called between Wade and Macky Sall, his former prime minister and dissident since 2009. Sall, supported by most opposition parties in the “Ben Yakar Bok” coalition, ended up winning the presidential election.
In this very tense pre-election environment, the Senegalese media reflected the divisiveness of this political conflict. On the one hand, the main groups of the so-called independent press took up the cause of the opposition. They largely amplified all the hostile voices to the candidacy of President Wade. They also covered and sometimes exaggerated acts of violence perpetrated against demonstrators, while setting themselves up as the guardians of the electoral process against any possible fraud on the part of the outgoing regime. On the other hand, there were elements of the media that were very close to Wade and defended the validity of his candidacy. There was no journalistic neutrality witnessed concerning the competing presidential campaigns. Only the state media conducted itself in a way that could be characterized as neutral.
