Human rights organisations all over the Arab region monitor the coverage of media ahead of presidential and Parliamentary elections in cooperation with IMS and Open Society International to generate documentation in order to advocate the important role of media in connection with democratic elections

Since 2004, all major national elections in the Arab region have been subject to monitoring of the media coverage of the election campaigns by a network of Arab human rights organisations in close cooperation with IMS and OSI. Thus, the media coverage during elections in Tunisia (2004), Palestine (2005 and 2006), Egypt (2005 and 2006) and more recently Yemen (2006), Syria (2007) and Morocco (2007) have been reviewed according to internationally recognized standards.

The Arab Working Group

The Arab working group on media monitoring identifies the local host organisation(s) in each country as well as regional experts who will participate. IMS provides the expertise on the monitoring process as well as funding together with OSI to carry out media monitoring locally and to train local monitors as well as securing the presence of regional experts from the Arab working group on media monitoring network.

Characteristically for all monitoring results, findings document that media are often biased towards the incumbent president or ruling party. This is reflected in media dedicating more airtime on TV, more minutes on broadcast radio, more and more frequent coverage in newspapers as well as bigger photos and more prominent presentation in the newspapers to the ruling party or president. By documenting these facts with the collected data, local media as well as civil society are given a powerful tool to advocate for better media coverage.

Media keen to improve reporting standards

Indeed, the experience of the Arab working group on media monitoring shows that Arab media are keen to improve their skills to be able to report in a more neutral manner. Also, media largely express a common obligation to fulfil a committment to ensure dissemination of information about all political parties and candidates to ensure that voters are given the privilege of making informed choices once they stand in the polling-booth.