Reporting under civilian and military rulers: Journalists' perceptions of press freedom and media exposure in Cameroon and Nigeria

Abstract

This article presents a comparative analysis of journalists' perceptions of press freedom in Cameroon and Nigeria. The former has a democratically elected government while the latter at the time had a military oligarchy. The study is based on a survey of journalists in Cameroon and Nigeria, neighbouring countries with different but comparable colonial and post-colonial histories and media developments. Although it is often taken for granted that a democratically elected government would tolerate press freedom while a military regime would censor the press, empirical evidence for this assumption is lacking. This study found that journalists in Cameroon do not believe that the press is free in Cameroon even though there is a democratically elected government. As expected, the perceptions of journalists in Nigeria confirmed the hypothesis that the press under a military regime cannot be free. The study also found that Cameroonian and Nigerian journalists are avid users of international media.