The first day of school always gets media attention, with coverage of how children react to going to school for the first time. The day offers the opportunity to cover children taking a big step in their lives. Past coverage has included many images to show children’s reaction to this event. ...
Monitoring conducted by Media Monitoring Africa (MMA) in 2003 as part of the Empowering Children & the Media (ECM) strategy showed that only 6% of all news included children. The latest data to emerge from the ECM reveals that representation of children has improved, marginally, to 8.4% of all n...
“Investing in the health and wellbeing of the children of South Africa is an investment in the future development of our country.” SA Medical Research Council, 2003 For the past three weeks, Media Monitoring Africa (MMA) has produced weekly reports commenting on media’s election coverage. The ...
Media Monitoring Africa has monitored every democratic election in South Africa. This year we are doing the same, providing daily and weekly reports on media coverage of election news[1], as well as MMA’s Election Media Ratings[2]. For the weekend 28 February and 1 March, the coverage of the elect...
Considering Youth Month provides ample opportunity to highlight issues around children, the Media Monitoring Project (MMP) wished to assess whether this was happening in South African media and if the coverage either violated or enhanced human rights of the children concerned. Read the full report h...
The comprehensive research study proposed by the MMP, the first of its kind in South Africa, aimed to address the representation of children and children’s rights in the news media. The ECM project took place over a three-month period in 2003. A group of monitors reviewed print, radio and televisi...
The Media Monitoring Project pioneered a best practice approach to working with children as monitors and with journalists as mentors in a project called the Children’s Media Mentoring Project. MMP worked together with the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism (IAJ) and Agência de Notícas d...
On the 21st of March, all people in South Africa celebrate Human Rights Day which commemorates the Sharpville massacre of 1960 and the signing of the Constitution. This is the same Constitution that guarantees the rights of children. In fact, Article 28.2 says ‘A child’s best interests are of pa...
The Media Monitoring Project (MMP)’s research with children and media challenges a number of preconceived ideas about children’s programming, how it is understood, and how it should be regulated. The study aimed to give practical realisation to children’s right to participate in all matters th...