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“We will support and promote the freedom of the press”, announced Penny Mordaunt, the British international development secretary in her earlier this month setting out her government’s future international development strategy.

After years in the doldrums, support to independent media shows signs of being revitalised. Many other donors – from philanthropic foundations to bilateral and multilateral development agencies – are recognising that prospects for human progress in the 21st century are increasingly tied to how people are informed or misinformed, how information is controlled or liberated, and how media institutions remain independent in the face of authoritarian or factional power. It is rooted in a recognition too of just how essential good journalism is to functioning democracies (take your pick from , , and myriad other examples from around the world).

The media support community has been a gloomy place in recent years. The heyday of independent media support was in the 1990s and 2000s when democracy was – or at least appeared to be – sweeping the world. The last two years have been especially depressing with increasingly successful clampdowns by authoritarians, unprecedented numbers of journalists killed or imprisoned, the ever more influential role of misinformation and disinformation in disrupting democratic politics, the growth of propaganda and counter propaganda in the context of violent extremism and a , not least in the US.

But it isn’t just the backdrop of world events that has darkened the mood within the media support community. It was the lack of success many traditional efforts had in really bringing into being the kinds of free, plural and professional media systems that we were collectively working to achieve.

If investment in media assistance is to return as an important development priority – and I believe it is vital that it does – then it needs to learn from what has worked and not worked in the past.

In this blog series, published around , I today ask first why media development efforts have not had the kind of impact that their backers and investors had hoped, especially in the where most international development donors are focusing their support.

In I offer some ideas for fresh thinking which I hope might spur broader debate.

In I talk about just some of the ways 鲍鱼tv Media Action is approaching these issues and adapting.

In I talk about how the sector – donors, practitioners and media partners – need to be better connected and strategy much more joined up to deliver the outcomes we want to see.

And in , I argue that the relationship between independent media support and the substantial funding invested in social and behaviour change communication is confused and unnecessarily disconnected.

Where are the successful models of media assistance?

Where can we point to the success stories or models where thriving independent, economically sustainable, credible media organisations and industries have emerged as a result of the media assistance programmes that were put in place in many countries? Why have all those media laws, regulatory bodies and access to information provisions that had been supported to come into being had so little effect on the actual structure, conduct and independence of the media – or indeed people’s access to trustworthy information?

How was it that hundreds of journalists had been trained with often little discernible improvement in the quality of reporting? How could the tech optimism offered by the US West Coast digital giants and the democratic energy of the Arab Uprisings so quickly turn to chaos and information powered factionalism, confusion and hate? How is it that so many national elections – and broader politics - are so vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation when so much effort has gone into media assistance designed to achieve the opposite?

For sure, different media support organisations () point to often extraordinary impact in particular areas and particular sectors – in nurturing independent journalism, in underpinning informed public debate at great scale, at building institutions and structures, in supporting elections underpinned by open and informed public debate, not disinformation and manipulation. I consider most media support organisations highly effective in what they do. But the fact remains that, especially in fragile states, the media is weaker, more co-opted and often less sustainable than for years.

The reasons are complex.

This is mostly to do with the scale of the challenge. The political incentives to control, distort or co-opt information and communication spaces (both traditional and digital) have greatly outgunned the efforts to defend and advance public interest media. I and many others only a few years ago that communicative power was shifting from elites to masses, from institutions to networks and from old to young. In many ways it has – but ultimately communicative power now rests most with those who see political or other advantage in undermining informed public debate and away from those who seek to underpin it.

But ascribing the current situation solely to tectonic power shifts would let us off the hook too easily. Some of our lack of success can be attributed to hubris - a lack of understanding of (or investment in understanding) political realities and a too blind assumption that the new information environments created such a hostile environment for authoritarians that democracy and freedom would inevitably triumph. This arena is a power game and communicative power now favours the authoritarians and the factionalists. Any future agenda that does not recognise and root its response in the political economy realities of 21st Century information and communication environment will fail.

But resources – or the lack of them – have mattered and many would argue that there simply hasn’t been enough money and effort to support independent media. I would agree with this - the has estimated that approximately two per cent of the funding development donors allocate to improving governance is directed at supporting media (and less than half a percent of total development funding).

But that would be too convenient an explanation and one that prevents us from properly examining what we need to stop doing and what we need do better.

And it isn’t just the lack of funding, it is the organisation that underpins it. Lack of funding can’t disguise the fact that in some countries – such as – huge amounts have been directed at supporting independent media but such efforts have too often been inchoate. Funding in this area has been poorly organised and particularly vulnerable to boom and bust cycles, to faddism (a few years ago if a proposal didn’t include some form of digital app it was unlikely to be supported) and, generally, to poor systems of lesson learning. There are very few spaces to assess what is working and not working in supporting media and the research base underpinning the field is weak, siloed and insufficiently interdisciplinary.

Ultimately, we have to accept that media development could have been far better supported and more organised and it would still have struggled in the face of these odds. That does not mean the situation is hopeless. Public interest journalism has arguably never been better respected and recognised with the Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers and the unsung heroics of independent journalists and citizen journalists around the world never playing a more important role in democracy. The importance of independent public debate has never been more valued in environments where elections are increasingly undermined and manipulated through control of information.

And our capacity to have an evidence and reality based debate is much improved now we can take off the rose tinted spectacles offered by the digital evangelists as public interest journalism has exposed how Cambridge Analytica has allegedly used data to distort the politics of , including fragile states, around the world.

But what we can’t do in the media development space is simply to repeat the recipes and strategies of the past. We need to understand and confront our own experiences of what has worked and not worked.

That forms the basis of

James Deane is Director of Policy and Research at 鲍鱼tv Media Action