CHAPTER 4: AFRICAN MEDIA BAROMETER THEMATIC TRENDS: 2011-2021 which indicates increasing corruption in journalism. The same practice is evident in AMBs for Eswatini (2018), Madagascar (2019), Uganda (2016), Gabon (2016) and Zimbabwe (2020), among others. In addition, the AMBs show that African news media are sometimes forced to abandon stories that focus on marginalised and minority social groups in favour of those more likely to resonate with advertisers and dominant political interests. The 2018 AMB for South Africa observes that although the country has a wide choice of information sources across a broad media spectrum, “access is skewed in favour of upper-income audiences…while the lower-income population has limited access to diverse and plural information sources”. It makes this critical observation: “[D]ue to the fact that the South African media is largely corporate, and advertising driven, the poor and marginalised are the least important group for the media to reach because of their low disposable income”. In the 2016 AMB for Kenya it was observed that the “increased commercialisation of the media has undermined the media’s role as a development and information tool”. The hypercommercial element in Kenyan media, the AMB highlighted, meant that “intense competition for government advertising by the different media outlets has resulted in compromised editorial content”. In effect, the AMB took note of the fact that Kenyan “media tend to promote commercial and political interests, largely ignoring social and cultural factors, as well as minority groups”. Another element severely affected by limited resources is the digital migration of African broadcast media, which arguably keeps many people outside the information loop and undermines their political agency. "Another element severely affected by limited resources is the digital migration of African broadcast media..." Nonetheless, this challenge is not as limpid as it seems at face value. While digital migration inevitably opens up the space for more players in the broadcast sector, thereby expanding the communicative reach, it has had the opposite effect in other settings. For instance, in Kenya, digital migration has been noted to escalate the cost of accessing the media. Following its successful implementation of digital migration in 2015, the country’s 2016 AMB notes that the process “cut off some people who found the costs of purchasing the set top box and the monthly subscription charges too high”. Predictably, rural populations were the worst affected. The consistent recommendations in response to the above 19 AFRICAN MEDIA BAROMETER 11 YEARS IN REVIEW