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Audience Perceptions of Radio Stations and Journalists in the Great Lakes

par Frère, Marie-Soleil
Editeur scientifique Willems, Wendy;Mano, Winston
Référence Everyday Media Culture in Africa. Audiences and Users, Routledge, London/New York, Ed. 1, page (140-160)
Publication Publié, 2017-01-01

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Résumé :

For the past ten years, radio has been the focus of many media assistance projects in the African Great Lakes region, especially in Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda and Burundi. In those post-conflict contexts, radio stations have been considered as crucial for peace building, reconstruction and reconciliation, at the national, as well as regional levels. But very little is known about how the local audiences relate to media, as audience polls are scarce and qualitative research often limited and biased. Only international NGOs (and not the media nor advertising industry) sometimes investigate media consumption in order to assess the impact of their programmes. In this chapter, we first interrogate the notion of the audience as viewed by the media assistance organizations and the assumptions underlying most of their potential ‘effects’ on peace building. Then, drawing from a research implemented in 2011-2012 in five cities of the region , we underline a few findings likely to draw a more complex profile of these post-conflict audiences. Looking at the popularity of some programmes and journalists, as well as at the reasons of their success, we show, on the one hand, how cross-national comparison can be useful for a better understanding of media practices in the region, and, on the other hand, how both national contexts and transnational developments mix to produce a diversity of local and permanently re-shaped media cultures