Uganda 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.
MSI Overview | Africa | Asia | Europe & Eurasia | Middle East & North Africa
Download Complete Uganda Chapter (PDF): 2012 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2006/7
MSI Uganda - 2012 Introduction
Overall Country Score: 2.24
Panelists reported few improvements in Uganda’s media sector this year and in fact moderately downgraded the country’s score compared with 2010. On several occasions over the year, the president, his ministers, and government officials openly declared their intent to close down any media house that reports negatively about the government. A number of journalists, especially from private media houses, were summoned by police for questioning at the Criminal Investigations Directorate headquarters and grilled over stories the government deemed critical.
Many of these charges do not advance to courts of law, and end up dying at police bureaus for lack of evidence—but not before they instill a sense of fear and intimidate journalists. Further, several journalists working for private media lost their jobs following complaints from government officials.
This situation is expected to worsen. The media is intensifying its coverage of corruption within the current government. Reports abound of the ruling party’s oppression and harassment of opposition leaders and opposition parties. The government continues to deny the opposition any platform to air their views, and on many occasions, it has used its armed agents to disperse, arrest, and beat up people in gatherings suspected of addressing political issues. The media covering these gatherings have not been spared, either, suffering injuries and having their equipment either confiscated or damaged by security personnel.
Despite all these problems, the media in Uganda have improved in terms of service delivery, with ever-improving access to modern equipment. On the downside, the current government uses this progress as a cover-up to claim that there is a lot of press freedom in the country.
Not all problems facing the media stem from external pressures. Corruption within the media profession persists, but some of Uganda’s major media houses have taken a proactive stance on this. A number of journalists caught accepting bribes from sources have lost their jobs. However, there is a sense that corruption is increasing, and the MSI panelists believe that the low pay—and the disparity in pay between editors and lower-level reporters—is harming the profession’s reputation. Employers continue to take advantage of freelance journalists, who constitute a majority in the trade, paying them little to nothing. In a positive turn, some trade associations have successfully defended journalists against such violations, although the success has been limited to date.
