This new article, published in the Journal of Communication, analyses how international advocacy campaigns approach and define media freedom, and what influences this process. Written by Martin Scott, Mel Bunce, Mary Myers and Maria Carmen Fernandez, the article presents a two-year case study of the Media Freedom Coalition – based on 55 interviews with key stakeholders, observations, and document analysis.
This case study sheds light on how norms of media freedom are constructed and contested on the international stage, and the implications of this for journalists and media freedom, as well as wider geo-political relations. The article shows that the Coalition adopted a state-centric, accountability-focused, and negative understanding of media freedom.
The decision to approach media freedom in this way had important implications. It legitimized a narrow, reactive, and “resource-light” approach to supporting media freedom, focused on “other” countries – rather than member countries in the Coalition.
Making a wider theoretical contribution, the article argues that critical norm research provides a helpful prism for understanding this Coalition’s operations, and the global politics of media freedom more generally. These findings have important implications for understandings of “norm entrepreneurship,” “media imperialism,” and “media freedom” itself.