March 02, 2015

Lesotho Elections Media Monitoring

DEMOCRACY & GOVERNANCE RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
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Media in Lesotho operate under strenuous conditions and the continual threat to free press poses serious challenges in covering crucial events like elections, particularly in ensuring that media carry the citizens agenda and ask the rights questions so that citizens become informed voters.

Laws prohibiting criticism of the government and incidents where journalists and their media houses have been attacked and threatened poses a major restriction to the ability of media in Lesotho to report elections to their optimum ability.

In light of this, Media Monitoring Africa (MMA) in partnership with the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA Lesotho) analysed the media coverage of the 2015 elections in Lesotho. The analysis in this report was made with considerable care, and with full understanding that the media in Lesotho does not operate in an environment that enables (both financially and legally) a strong, independent media. The analysis is aimed to encourage the media to improve their reporting on elections in terms of salience, visibility and quality. In doing so the Interim Report will look at four areas of election reporting only:

• Political Party Coverage
• Sources (Is there diversity of voices and opinions?)
• Gender
• Topic Coverage
• Is the Coverage Fair?

To answer these questions, we present the following interim results: View interim results report

View the results presentation or download the print version.