A Study on the Role of Journalistic Professionalism in Regulating and Improving Ethiopian Journalism
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Date
2013-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Ever since press freedom was announced in 1992, Ethiopian journalism has drawn the attention
of many researchers. Many of the studies have focused on the impact of external factors, such as
government and other interest groups on the press and practice of journalism. However, the
influence of press and journalism itself has been very rarely studied, and this study was meant to
fill this gap.
Journalism in Ethiopia has suffered from a tug of war between state owned and private media as
well as within the private media; this division has made the threat to press freedom twofold. This
study attempted to examine the cause(s) for the division by eliciting views of media owners,
directors, editors, journalists, journalists associations, and journalism educators; it also tried to
examine the role of journalistic professionalism with respect to regulating and improving
Ethiopian Journalism.
To this end, data were gathered through in-depth interviews from key informants, who were
picked up purposively and whose responses were analyzed qualitatively within the theoretical
framework of Differentiation Theory, and Hallin and Mancini's Polarized Pluralist conceptual
Model.
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Accordingly, the 1992 unprecedented transformation of Ethiopian media land escape from state
monopoly to 'liberalized' and 'privatized' media system was found to be the major cause for the
division. This being the major cause, however, the study has shown that journalistic
professionalism has not yet been conceived by the media practitioners as an important instrument
in guarding off outsiders' pressures in general and state interference in particular.
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Role of Journalistic Professionalism