What role do social accountability actors play in resisting media capture in sub-Saharan Africa? Evidence from Ghana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although media capture is a global issue, it is a particularly significant problem in sub-Saharan African countries like Ghana. Media capture occurs when media organisations become incapable of performing critical watchdog functions, such as fighting corruption and human rights violations, because of pressures from capital and power. This article addresses a fundamental question: In Ghana’s Fourth Republic, what role do social accountability actors play in resisting media capture by capital and power? I argue that social accountability actors perform three essential, interrelated roles: (1) defending media freedoms and independence, (2) activating and facilitating the media’s work and (3) legitimising and encouraging critical journalism. In doing so, they use a combination of strategies – from advocacy, denunciation and legal action to establishing and funding non-profit media outlets to do investigative journalism. This work extends the literature by examining the crucial role social accountability actors play in counteracting media capture so that critical journalism can do its job.
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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 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".