Media Monitoring Africa (MMA) is monitoring selected media’s coverage of the run up to the 2021 Local Government Elections (LGE) to determine what issues are considered a priority by the media, check whether political parties and/or their candidates are represented fairly and without bias and whether there is an equitable representation of the different racial and gender groups, among other things.

More in-depth analyses will be written on these findings every month and at the end of the election monitoring period, an overall report will be compiled. Below is a brief analysis to show what and who dominated media coverage from the 19th of September to the 26th of September, 2021. A total of 546 stories on elections were recorded in this monitoring period, a 138 more from the 408 stories recorded in the previous week. The gradual increase in elections stories is typical of media trends at this time.