Africa

Senegal

{This graph represents scores that have been modified by CIMA so that higher scores indicate a better media situation. It is intended to show trends over time; each index measures significantly different factors of press freedom. To see an explanation for how this graph was created, click here.}
 

IREX Description:

The 2009 MSI panelists' conversations reflected the unease that Senegalese journalists and media outlets feel about the established authorities. Since the publication in 2003 of investigative journalist Abdou Latif Coulibaly's work on the allegedly misguided ways of President Abdoulaye Wade's political regime, titled, Wade, un opposant au pouvoir: l'alternance piégée? (Wade, an Opposition Figure in Power: The Poisoned Chalice?), journalists in private media have been constantly accused of acting as members of the political opposition and have been treated as opposition figures. As a result, the media are often subjected to pressure at the hands of the government.

The panelists also confirmed a trend reported in 2008: Senegalese media enterprises are overwhelmingly unprofitable. As a result of difficult socioeconomic conditions and a lack of appropriate management strategies, media outlets are in a critical situation, and financial insecurity is an everyday reality for many journalists. In addition, the 2009 panel found that the professional shortcomings identified by the 2008 panel had not been eliminated. On the contrary, the media regularly violate the rules of professional ethics and conduct.

Nevertheless, the panelists did discern a few rays of hope. In the legislative arena, a new media code came out of the Assises Nationales, a forum for national dialogue. Between September 2009 and March 2010, the forum brought together journalists, Communication Ministry experts, associations of journalists, judges and magistrates, leading figures from civil society, and independent experts. The new code, which is intended to provide solutions to the problems being faced by the Senegalese media, is awaiting a vote of Parliament.

Read more on IREX’s site…

Reporters Without Borders Description:

President Abdoulaye Wade reacted to the outcry caused by the imprisonment in 2004 of journalist Madiambal Diagne by promising press law reform. But Senegalese journalists are still waiting. And the situation has not improved since then, rather the contrary as history appears to repeat itself. A court in September 2008 sentenced the editor of the daily 24 Heures Chrono to three years in prison for “publishing false news” over an article in which he said that the president and his son Karim were “mixed up in” a money laundering case. El Malick Seck was finally pardoned by the president after eight months in prison.

Journalists, who are frequently threatened, are also vulnerable to interrogation and courts summonses. Critical and independent media have to contend with disguised censorship and deliberate scrambling of the airwaves.

One striking incident sent shock waves through the profession and will not easily be forgotten. A police commando carried out an early morning raid on 17 October 2005 against radio Sud FM in Dakar after it carried out and broadcast an interview with a rebel leader in Casamance, a separatist region destabilised by guerrilla activity. They forcibly closed the station down and arrested everyone on the premises at the time, in its offices and studios. The radio’s correspondents in Ziguinchor in the south-west and Saint-Louis in the north-west were arrested simultaneously and all the station’s relays throughout the country were cut.

Since then the climate has gradually deteriorated between the media and the government. The independent press, which praised “the changeover” to the skies when President Wade came to power in 2000, has become more wary towards him, not to say more critical.

Read more on RSF’s site…

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