Addis Ababa, 8 April 2015 (WIC) - The Addis Ababa University School of Journalism and Communication yesterday held a workshop on issues related to the Media, Democracy and Election under the title ‘Media and Elections: The Ethiopian Experience and its Implications for the 2015 Elections’ in which four papers presented and various pertinent institutions discussed.

Opening the event, Dagim Afework, Coordinator of the School’s Print and Web Journalism Programme Unit said that, as part of its social responsibility, the School organized the discussion platform believing that an election where the Media is heavily involved allows for the process to be free, fair and democratic, while the opposite helps lessen the role election plays in building a strong democratic system by forcing citizens to vote intuitively.

First to the podium, Dr. Abdissa Zerai presented a paper titled ‘Media and Democracy in Ethiopia: The Hitherto trajectory’, which focused on Media nexus Democracy and Ethiopia’s experiment with democracy. In his presentation, Dr. Abdissa said that Ethiopia started its experiment with democracy in 1991, with rights for press freedom and freedom of expression guaranteed in the new constitution.

He also said that the contributing factors for the current state of affair can be explained from internal factor related to lack of professionalism, and from external factor in connection with authoritarian culture serving as a catalyst for intolerance.

According to Dr. Abdissa, the private Media in Ethiopia’s context was born as a rebel and took on an adversarial and confrontational role against the government, while on the side of the government, it saw the Media as an instrument to be used to achieve intended objectives rather than an important institution in its own right.

During the workshop, two papers were presented on what roles the Broadcast and Print Media played during the 2005 and 2010 general elections, were presented respectively by Woldu Yimesil, CEO of Fana Broadcasting Corporate and Teshager Shiferaw, Lecturer at School of Journalism and Communication. The fourth and final paper of the day was presented by Dr. Negeri Lencho, an Assistant Professor at the School, entitled ‘How to report elections in the Ethiopian context’.

The workshop was attended by political party leaders, government officials, journalists, journalism educators and representatives from various pertinent institutions.(EH)