In Democracy’s Shadow: The ‘New’ Independent Press and the Limits of Media Reform in Morocco
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines the burgeoning of a new ‘independent’ press that has emerged in the last decade in Morocco, heralding the decline of the traditional partisan press. An analysis of two partisan newspapers reveals that the partisan press has failed to promote press freedom and frequently engages in self-censorship when confronting ‘red line’ issues in Moroccan politics. In contrast, the enterprising independent press has sought to broaden the margin of freedom through insisting on broaching those sensitive issues. As such, it has had great ramifications and implications at the level of readership and for the political reform debate raging in the country. Paradoxically, however, while attacking the old school of journalism for its partisanship, the new independent press has carved out a new form of ‘partisanship’, functioning as a conduit for an oppositional political discourse. The article reviews the debate surrounding those ‘red lines’ and discusses the prospects of reforming the press codes as one way of ensuring the survival of this independent streak of journalism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".