SECTOR 4 4.3 The media cover the full spectrum of events, issues and cultures, including business/economics, cultural, local and investigative stories. All media houses have sections dedicated to diferent topics. However, the most dominating information is political or about politicians since that sells better than all other issues. Since culture is the “poor cousin”, editors go to the internet to ill the culture pages and to make up for their deiciencies. here is truly a problem of information gathering, either the topic makes serious data collection diicult or journalists themselves choose to overlook journalistic research in favor of events where per diems are distributed (political) which have been given names such as “gombo” or “inal communiqué”. For as long as an article is on cultural issues a journalist will be able to feature a publication on it only when he/she is given per diem or else the article is not likely to be featured. he media is not very much into investigative stories. An example is seen in the disappearance of an oicial of the Ministry of Finance for a whole year and nobody tried to ind out why this happened. here has been a preference for emergency journalism and emergency in its extreme form. here are no investigative journalists in Benin and most investigative issues are abandoned in favor of politics because the editorials like to cover issues that will be read by many. In case an investigative issue can be discussed, the editorial chief has to weigh it to ind out if it will sell or not or whether he/she only allows it to ill editorial space. According to one of the panelists, the added value of investigative stories does not seem to be evident to the media houses. Surprisingly the journalists are in dire search of investigative stories when they want to take part in a national or international media contest as good practitioners of radio, the print media and TV. Scores: Individual scores: 1 Country does not meet indicator 2 Country meets only a few aspects of indicator 3 Country meets some aspects of indicator 4 Country meets most aspects of indicator 5 Country meets all aspects of the indicator Average score: 3.3 (2007 = 3.9 ; 2009 = 3.3) AFRICAN MEDIA BAROMETER BENIN 2011 119