mansour saei
Abstract
The main aim of the current paper is to identify and analyze the "structural" and "professional" obstacles of media monitoring over the government and governmental organizations of Iran. This research is a kind of applied-exploratory study. The study has applied qualitative method (in-depth interview ...
Read More
The main aim of the current paper is to identify and analyze the "structural" and "professional" obstacles of media monitoring over the government and governmental organizations of Iran. This research is a kind of applied-exploratory study. The study has applied qualitative method (in-depth interview with journalists and public relations professionals), for data gathering and purposive sampling method for selecting samples. Research results show that the most important cultural obstacles are "secrecy" and "fear" of transparency in Iranian culture, acclaim of praise, the fear of criticism among Iranians. Political obstacles are secrecy in the media due to the heavy shadow of politics, the government officials’ attitude toward the media as a tool serving their purposes, the government intervention in all of media affairs, media mostly belonging to the government, political treatment of the media, the partisan functionality of the media, and the politician’s engagement in the media management. Also the most important legal obstacles are the need to obtain a license for media activities, the breadth of exceptions and red lines of informing, and the most important economic obstacles are the government's presence in the media economy, lack of financial independence in the media, bribery of reporters, inequality competitive conditions between the governmental and non-governmental media. Also the most important obstacles within government organizations include the ownership approach of government to information, media bans on government meetings, considering media criticism as aggressive and misdeed cather by the government managers. Finally, the most important internal media obstacles include media self-censorship, the presence of young and inexperienced people in the media, lack of recognition of investigative journalism, dominance of event-oriented approach instead of process-oriented approach.
