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Access to trusted, accurate information for all is a promise made under UN Sustainable Development Goal 16, and essential to achieving all of the Global Goals – including gender equality, climate change, eliminating poverty, reducing inequalities and sustainable cities.

³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Media Action has supported public interest media since our founding in 1999, particularly through strengthening editorial, production and management capacity, to help media organisations hold those in power to account while enabling public debate and dialogue. We are proud to support over 200 media partners.

Now, media’s essential function as the ‘fourth estate’ is threatened, by political, regulatory, economic, technological, institutional and societal changes – including violence against and repression of journalists, and media market monopolies. Misinformation and disinformation increasingly undermine democratic and effective politics and constructive public debate.

To support media freedom, and ensure independent media can survive, we are working toward change at many levels:

• building editorial and technical skills, and encouraging audience demand for high-quality journalism;
• exploring more viable business models that better adapt to market conditions;
• developing more enabling legal and regulatory frameworks for independent media;
• creating more dynamic media networks, and champions who can help protect journalists and advocate for media as part of good governance, and 
• supporting policy-makers and donors to understand when and how their support is best channelled.

Our major media development projects have included Support to Independent Media in the Eastern Partnership Countries and PRIMED (Protecting Independent Media for Effective Development). These projects, funded by the UK FCDO, cover multiple countries in Eastern and Central Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where we have helped to strengthen editorial standards, re-examine business models for better sustainability, and generate sector learning on what works and what doesn’t in supporting media viability and resilience.

³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Media Action provides strategic policy advice to the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) Governance Network on media and governance issues.

We also proposed and conducted a feasibility study into the creation of the to address the devastating economic crisis facing public interest media in resource-poor settings, and the consequences for governance. With support from  - and co-founded by our head of policy, James Deane - the Fund is now gaining global momentum as an essential support for public interest media, in countries where economic or political conditions might otherwise silence these crucial voices.