Resisting Media Capture: Mobilizing for Media Freedom in Uganda

Abstract

How can journalist groups and media organizations challenge media capture? Previous research has documented how governments in authoritarian contexts seek to control and dominate the media sector by, for instance, introducing laws and regulations that limit free speech, corrupting licensing systems, and directing government funding and advertisement to loyal media outlets. In Uganda – as in several other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa – government liberalized the media sector in the early 1990s and passed a new constitution that guarantees press freedom, but has since tightened its control of independent media through a range of legislative and regulatory measures as well as outright assaults on individual journalists.

However, this raises questions about how the primary targets of such capture – journalists, press freedom groups and media houses – respond to and seek to resist media capture. In this paper, we seek to explain how journalist groups and media organizations can challenge government attempts to subvert independent media. Drawing on original fieldwork data, including a set of semi-structured interviews with journalists and media freedom activists in Uganda, we analyze mobilization strategies to counter government attempts to control the media sector. We tentatively conclude that the media sector as a collective in some cases has been able to push back government control attempts. However, since media houses and journalists in general suffer material and economic deprivation, successful resistance requires combining legal mobilization with other forms of contention.