This study examines the broader influence of four community radio stations' programs in the context of evacuation and preparedness measures with a month-long observation of people's behavior during cyclones. This study also engages 16 in-depth interviews with radio station managers, listeners' club members, and non-listeners across the coast. Study findings reveal that vulnerable people in isolated coastal areas and offshore islands continue to trust community radio for information related to cyclone preparedness and evacuation. Results of this study ascertain that listening to hazard-related programs on state-run and community radio stations has played a significant role in cyclone-related disaster preparedness activities relating to minimizing cyclone-induced life and property losses. The distinct feature of broadcasting early warnings in local dialects has increased the comprehensibility, information clarity, and reliability of the warning messages delivered by community radio. Better access to information has helped at-risk people make adequate preparations as they face impending cyclone risks. These activities together appear to have helped community radio listeners to incur a significantly lower degree of losses than that of non-listeners. However, while safety campaigns deployed by community radio stations have the potential to increase preparedness and timely evacuation, it has also been found that the capacity of stations to serve as effective channels for disaster campaigns still has limitations, largely due to inadequate training in crisis communication. This study recommends developing localized broadcast plans for cyclone warning campaigns, a step that would significantly contribute to community safety.

This chapter explores some of the positive strategies employed by South Asian media institutions to enhance workplace happiness and help journalists to cope with stress and traumatic experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Happiness is crucial for media institutions because journalism is one of the most stressful professions. Previous studies have found that the COVID-19 crisis has had a considerable impact on journalism. Hence, it is important to maintain workplace happiness in media institutions, particularly during a crisis like the pandemic.

A problem faced by journalism educators in South Asian nations is that curricula are not developed within their cultural, political, and historical context. Most often, curricula mimic those in journalism degrees in the Global South (usually from the USA) and transferred to media systems and political frameworks (often informed by the UK) that are both implemented in very different contexts. The end of formal British political colonization does not make it appropriate for journalism educators to flatly adopt US curricula, which is tantamount to the recolonization of knowledge. It has also been observed that journalism does not operate in a vacuum; it is shaped by varying moral, ethical, and religious values found in different countries around the world. Accusations have therefore been made that journalism curricula in South Asian nations, like many countries in the Global South, are grounded in Western normative ideas of the role and function of journalism and, as such, are ill-suited to, and ignore, the lived realities and contexts they serve. The global and the local do not exist as true binaries. While scholarship in the Global South has its colonial legacy, and the Global North-dominated scholarship in recent years, both have started to pay more attention to the polarization of North and South, yet less attention has been paid to a ‘de-colonization’ of the media and communications discipline. Even less attention has been paid to theory from the South that can contribute to scholarship in both the Global South and the Global North and, more importantly, that can be put at the heart of a truly global research agenda and curriculum. To address this gap, this case study of Bangladeshi journalism education reviewed the curricula of leading university journalism programs as well as literature in journalism education and journalism cultures of the country to explore links between power, journalism education, and social relations. The study aims to encourage journalism educators to apply a decolonizing approach that appreciates the pedagogical value of local practices related to media and communication and also embeds Asian epistemologies across the curricula. This will help foster co-created learning that enriches both the professional repertoire of journalists and social well-being, by bridging the cultural, political, and social rifts between local and Western notions of journalism education. Based on the contexts and dimensions of journalistic culture outlined in the Worlds of Journalism Study (2019) and journalism teaching in the Declaration of the World Journalism Education Congress (2007, 2019), I argue that comparative studies of the news media from post-colonial societies needs to be used to provide an understanding of one’s own rather than imported curricula rooted in the Global North or West.

This study aims to identify the different news content of COVID-19 coverage in the major national dailies of Bangladesh during the pre-lockdown to the end of the lockdown period. Along with quantifying the total COVID-19 coverage in newspapers, it has compared the prominence given to COVID-19 news coverage in different pages of the newspapers studied. By following content analysis, descriptive statistics has been used in this study for discussion and presentation. The study revealed that the news coverage started to grow with the announcement of the pandemic and declined gradually after the end of the lockdown in Bangladesh. The result also ascertains that COVID-19 related news was featured on different pages during the first five-months between January and May, and the percentage of news coverage of COVID-19 was at its highest level from 1 to 15 May. The study shows that COVID-19 related prevention, impacts, mitigation, preparedness, and world concern were the major themes in the newspapers. Many new terms like ‘quarantine’, ‘social distancing’, ‘lockdown’, etc., were presented frequently on different pages as news items. This study clearly states that a good number of photos and commercials have been published from March to May. Similarly, most of the editorials, commentaries and interviews were published on government preparedness and effects of coronavirus on an individual level. Finally, our study concludes that the interventions of the print media contribute highly in minimising the adverse effects of the COVID19 crisis and recommends that policy makers can make immediate decisions on the existing gaps of health care emergencies through the content analysis of published news on the pandemic.

This study has assessed the capacity of four community radio stations, located along the coastal areas of Bangladesh in regards to campaign strategies of cyclonic disasters. Examining the programme contents, effects of messaging, and drawbacks of their broadcast strategy this study reveals that although radio listenership has been dropped dramatically among commoners, poor people living in isolated coastal areas and nearby islands have trust to community radio campaign in preparedness and evacuation activities to avert deaths and property losses from cyclone and tidal bore. This evidence notes that campaign by community radio has potential in averting immediate danger from cyclone and tidal bore but the capacity of community radio stations are yet to demonstrate disaster friendly readiness due to want of adequate training for broadcasters. It then recommends that a communications plan for disaster campaigns combined with maintaining a network amongst community radio stations before, and during the cyclonic hit would significantly contribute to community safety, a decrease in property damage, and overall morale in the shadow of cyclones.

Positing Bangladesh as a developing South Asian nation that faces increasing social, economic, political, and cultural development challenges at the rural level, Chapter 3 looks at community radio as having emerged in response to these challenges. The chapter critically analyses Bangladesh CR to explore how Bangladesh incorporates a participatory approach to CR planning, management, and programming to raise the voice of marginal communities. This is a major concern of the author, and he argues that community ownership and participation, capacity-building, fair operations, and sustainability are crucial areas that must be addressed.

This chapter examines power dynamics in rural Bangladesh, scrutinizing how people accumulate, conceptualize and perceive the use of and relationships between social, economic and political power and their impact on the access of digital resources across the country. The Union Digital Center (UDC), an Information and Communication Technology project implemented by local government units in Bangladesh, is positioned as a subject of inquiry. With 55 in-depth interviews from center users, non-users and center entrepreneurs of six UDCs from across Bangladesh, this study shows that influential elites still enjoy privileged access to rural resources while deriving additional benefits from the UDCs, whereas poorer groups have severe limitations to their access to digital services and are actually further deprived rather than empowered by community access to digital technology.

Development journalism remains an important concept in the journalism studies literature, but it has, at the same time, suffered from a lack of empirical research. Drawing on a survey of 2598 journalists from eight South Asian, Southeast Asian, and sub-Saharan African countries, which was conducted as part of the Worlds of Journalism Study, this study assesses the importance journalists ascribe to three key development journalism rolessocial intervention, national development, and educating people. It also compares these perceptions across the countries, between government- and privately owned news media in these countries, and between these countries and 19 Worlds of Journalism Study countries in Western Europe and North America, which profess to adhere to an objective and democratic press function. Findings suggest that journalists from the eight countries, across government- and privately owned media, considered development journalism important, and detached, adversarial journalism as less important. Their rating of the latter roles differed considerably from those of journalists from the 19 comparison countries. Results suggest that journalists were more likely socialized into their roles rather than being forced into the same by the heavy hand of government.

This paper looks at the extent to which journalistic culture in Muslim-majority countries is shaped by a distinctive Islamic worldview. We identified four principles of an Islamic perspective to journalism: truth and truth-telling (siddiq and haqq), pedagogy (tabligh), seeking the best for the public interest (maslahah), and moderation (wasatiyyah). A survey of working journalists in Africa (Egypt, Sierra Leone, and Sudan), Asia (Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Oman, Qatar, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates), and Europe (Albania and Kosovo) found manifestations of these roles in the investigated countries. The results point to the strong importance of an interventionist approach to journalism—as embodied in the maslahah principle—in most societies. Overall, however, journalists’ roles in Muslim-majority countries are not so much shaped by a distinctively Islamic worldview as they were by the political, economic, and socio-cultural contexts.

In the wider context of growing digitalisation in South Asia, this article examines the impacts of a public–private–people partnership (4Ps) information and communication technology (ICT) initiative of the Bangladesh government, administered through local governmental offices, the Union Information Service Centre (UISC). Scrutinising the operation of six UISCs in rural communities across Bangladesh, the study researches the potential of ICTs to influence existing asymmetrical power relations and empower local people. Asking to what extent ICTs enable more people to actively participate in their communities and what the implications for empowerment are, it is found that top-down ICT intervention by itself cannot bring substantial change for people at the bottom of the social pyramid. Asymmetrical power relations continue to deprive marginalised groups from receiving the claimed benefits of ICT facilities. The study suggests the need for a more critical, practice-focused understanding of relationships between ICTs and rural empowerment, while also highlighting the changing modalities of connecting states and their citizens in postmodern South Asia.

This article examines the relationship between information and communication technology (ICT) access and the empowerment of rural people through the Union Information and Service Centres (UISCs) established at the Union Council, the lowest administrative unit of the Bangladeshi government. Based on ethnographic research that explores both everyday peoples’ and beneficiary perspectives, this study reveals that given the conditions of poverty, the illiterate and relatively powerless majority of the rural poor failed to access and use the facilities provided through UISCs, which were inevitably controlled by the power elites in the service area. The study concludes that while access to and use of relevant information is a key component of empowerment, the way UISCs have been organized in a particular kind of socio-economic arrangement, the services delivered neither succeeded in providing equality of access nor has the information available through these centres been deemed relevant to promoting rural investment or reducing social disparity in any significant way. This article argues that empowerment from ICTs does not follow automatically after their implementation, but rather the success of technologies and their access is subject to power relationships within communities.

The empowerment of global citizenry through Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) has drawn ample attention among development planners since the 1990s. Proponents of rural and community empowerment are encouraging governments in the developing world to take ICT initiatives, suggesting that the investment in ICTs will enable those countries to bypass more gradual development processes in order to engage their citizens on par with the developed world (Dey et al, 201O; Harris, 2016; Takio, 2013). But this notion is flawed for three key reasons. Firstly, it over emphasises the role of technology through simplifying the social, political and economic parameters of development. Secondly, it overlooks the needs, abilities and cultural context within which those technologies were originally introduced and interrelated; third: the importance of the political, social and economic context within which those technologies are now being applied (Mansell, 2014; Thomas, 2012).

This article explores the service delivery of Union Information and Service Centres (UISC), an Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-based telecentre initiative of the Government of Bangladesh. Based on a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, the study aims to assess the contribution of UISC to improving government service delivery for, and empowering rural communities. The study argues that the claim “UISCs have emerged as the torchbearers of modernity, hope and opportunities to enhance one stop public service delivery to rural poor” is particularly ambitious and does not hold true for the marginalized poor the project aims to connect. While UISCs do bring benefits for specific power holders in rural areas – particularly the educated rural youth, entrepreneurs, and party activists – the rural poor are marginalized further as a result. Finally, it suggests that the introduction of ICT to poor nations alone is not enough, but that the underlying power structures in communities are influential factors for people’s access, empowerment, and benefit.

This paper reports on a survey of the resources and capabilities, including infrastructure and logistics in 14 university-level Bangladeshi journalism institutions. Progress of the university journalism programmes is hampered by poorly resourced convergent news laboratory, shortage of research and teaching staff with professional media experience. It posits that university journalism programmes in Bangladesh, regardless of their ideological inclinations, should revamp their curriculum to emphasize on practical courses so as to keep pace with changing technologies in the newsroom.

This article is concerned with a lack of an agreed framework for the curriculum of journalism education in Bangladesh. Starting from the want of any agreement between educators and professionals, which has hindered its journalism education as a mature discipline in Western higher education, the article argues that a lack of agreed values and beliefs about the journalism profession itself still persists in Bangladesh. Examining the existing curricula, facilities and capacities at 14 different public and private universities of Bangladesh, this article focuses on the generic problems of framing a comprehensive curriculum and the challenges ahead in the corporatization of local media industry, privatization of knowledge institutions, and new media intervention by clarifying curricular differences. It also tries to help point the way forward following basic principles of journalism curricula in Bangladesh's context. The result also comes out from 35 interviews with media management people, senior journalists and former journalism graduates working in media houses and journalism department heads. This study finds that Bangladeshi university journalism curricula and pedagogue style cannot fulfill the demand that seeks in the media houses due to the curricula's inadequate focus on practical courses, technological inadequacies in the university and controversy over the mission and merit of university-based journalism education.

Development journalism remains an important concept in the journalism studies literature, but it has, at the same time, suffered from a lack of empirical research. Drawing on a survey of 2598 journalists from eight South Asian, Southeast Asian, and sub-Saharan African countries, which was conducted as part of the Worlds of Journalism Study, this study assesses the importance journalists ascribe to three key development journalism roles—social intervention, national development, and educating people. It also compares these perceptions across the countries, between government- and privately owned news media in these countries, and between these countries and 19 Worlds of Journalism Study countries in Western Europe and North America, which profess to adhere to an objective and democratic press function. Findings suggest that journalists from the eight countries, across government- and privately owned media, considered development journalism important, and detached, adversarial journalism as less important. Their rating of the latter roles differed considerably from those of journalists from the 19 comparison countries. Results suggest that journalists were more likely socialized into their roles rather than being forced into the same by the heavy hand of government.

This paper explains the risk exposure of local correspondents in Bangladesh when covering cyclones. The findings identify correspondents working in the cyclone-prone coastal regions operate in the best interests of the beneficiaries and local people, but put themselves at increased exposure to risks. Data derived from in-depth interviews of 23 correspondents reveal that media professionals stationed in the coastal region provide first-hand information to different lifeline agencies about evacuation and relief needs of the area immediately, before and during any cyclonic hit. This study recognizes that negligence and lack of sensitivity and understanding from the staff at the headquarters acts as a deterrent for the local correspondents from carrying out their jobs.

This article explains political activism among educated youths in Bangladesh and how information and communication technologies ( ICTs) change their political attitudes and behaviors. The findings identify motivations and psychological factors that affect patterns of new media use in political participation. Data from 23 interviewees, alongside those of 69 focus group participants, reveal that Bangladeshi youths increasingly favor forward-looking agendas by rejecting traditional ideology-based party politics. They have a passion for shaping their opinions through social networking instead of processions, party meetings, and political violence. This study finds that youth engagement through virtual communication has no direct impact on political decision-making but may play a pivotal role in some policy-making processes in Bangladesh.