[FoME] Medienboom und Medienförderung in Afghanistan

[Christoph Dietz]

Die Medienszene in Afghanistan boomt, sagt eine Studie des Center for
International Media Assistance (CIMA), einer Unterabteilung des
"National Endowment for Democracy" (NED) in Washington, DC: 175
Radiostationen gibt es heute, 75 Fernsehkanäle, vier
Nachrichtenagenturen, mindestens sieben Tageszeitungen; 61 Prozent der
Afghanen haben Mobiltelefon. Private Medien seien von der
US-Entwicklungsbehörde USAID gestärkt worden, die "psychological
operations" des US-Verteidigungsministeriums hingegen seien ein
zweischneidiges Schwert.

Vollständiger Text (Peter Cary, An explosion of news: the state of
media in Afghanistan, Februar 2012, 56 Seiten):
http://cima.ned.org/sites/default/files/CIMA-Afghanistan%20-%2003-01-12.pdf

Aus dem Executive Summary, p. 4-5:
 
"... The exponential media growth is due to the enthusiasm of Afghan
entrepreneurs and to support from the United States, through the U.S.
Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S. embassy, and
from European governments and other nations. It is also due to the work
of many NGOs that they hired. Support from the United States, the
biggest donor, has waxed and waned. From 2002 to 2005 USAID spend $23
million to launch news media outlets and train journalists, and from
2006 to 2010 funding totaled $20.64 million. That included a couple of
lean years, 2007 and 2008, when spending was only $3.3 million each
year. But with the Obama administration’s Afghan military surge of
2009 there also came a media spending surge. USAID funded a $22 million
project called the Afghanistan Media Development and Empowerment Project
(AMDEP) for 2011, and a separate $7 million project to put news on
cellphones was put to bid. Meanwhile, $183 million was allocated to the
U.S. embassy in Kabul for a wide array of media projects in 2010 and
2011. And the Defense Department budgeted $180 million for information
operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for 2011 alone, some portion of which
went to support Afghan media. The effectiveness of all this spending is
difficult to gauge, but the smaller and more focused projects – such
as creating new radio stations–tend to be seen as generally
successful, while the value of the larger and broader projects–such as
an anti-insurgency message campaign – is harder to judge ..."