The multi-faceted and widely publicised Zimbabwean crisis had profound implications for the country’s media landscape. This panel aims to explore changes in media policy regimes as well as journalistic practices in the context of increasing economic and political instability.
With the incidence of a large number of farm occupations in March 2000, the killings of several white farmers and the increasing popularity of a new opposition party, Zimbabwe rapidly came to dominate headlines all over the world. As a result of this large amount of media attention, the Zimbabwean government began to be more and more concerned about the way in which it was portrayed. Since the 2000 Parliamentary Elections, several measures have been implemented that sought to restrict the flow of information within the country and between Zimbabwe and the rest of the world. These measures (and particular the closure of the private daily newspaper The Daily News in September 2003) were sharply criticized by local and international press freedom organizations and this increasingly made the Zimbabwean media environment itself a subject of attention. Strong international interest and protection and promotion of the ‘independent’ media in Zimbabwe enabled the government to represent the private media as failing to defend national interests. Discourses in the state-controlled press created a strong divide between on the one hand ‘patriotic’ media supported by the government and oppositional media funded by ‘white’, ‘Western’ or Rhodesian’ interests. However in the newsrooms and media houses, journalists often sought to move away from this polarised environment, using various methods to subvert the pressures exerted on them by different newspaper owners. This panel seeks to address how in recent years the Zimbabwean media have been shaped in various ways by recent economic and political changes. Drawing upon a range of theoretical perspectives, it will argue that a combination of different approaches such as political economy of media, sociology of journalism and discourse analysis is required in order to understand recent changes in Zimbabwe’s media landscape.
The paper seeks to interrogate the portrayal of the Zimbabwean land crisis in the mainstream international media. How is the narrative of the conflict re/constructed in the international media? The interpretation of the land crisis in Zimbabwe has clearly been polarised and the differences can clearly be noted. The mainstream international media have mainly pursued the view that President Mugabe is an authoritarian ruler, using the land issue as political card to further his grip on power. Thus the issue is not land but rather democratic reforms which the government is trying to stall. The framing of the land crisis in the international media largely resonates around the issues of democracy, human rights and political change. Alternative viewpoints from other media sections are that the President Mugabe is being vilified for standing up for the rights of his people. This paper argues that the representations of the land crisis and international censures directed the attention away from the real complex dilemma of land ownership in Zimbabwe.
Following the global shift away from state monopoly broadcasting and towards plural broadcasting systems characterised by a combination of public service, private/commercial and community broadcasting, several countries on the African continent have instituted policy reforms which have seen the rise of both commercial and community broadcasters operating alongside the state broadcasters. This study compares the broadcasting policy reform processes in two neighbouring African countries, both former British colonies, and both once part of the Central African Federation. It illustrates how historical legacy, global forces of economic liberalisation, the donor community, local networks of civil society groups and contemporary social, political and economic factors have interacted in different ways to influence the broadcasting policy outcomes in the two countries. Finally, the paper discusses the extent to which the policy reforms in each of the two countries have contributed to the process of democratisation.
In its grand project to ‘maintain sovereignty and prevent recolonisation of Zimbabwe’, the government aimed -among other things- to increase local content on radio and television, limit entry of foreign correspondents and prevent foreign ownership of media organizations. The local private press was often branded as ‘unpatriotic’, not defending the interests of the nation but owned and operated by ‘enemies of the state’. This paper will discuss what constituted ‘national media’ in state discourses and how these defined and justified which media houses belonged to and which were excluded from the Zimbabwean nation.
In this paper I argue that the new media have risen to be the epicentre of Zimbabwe’s re-democratisation efforts by offering a viable alternative public sphere not only for the news media, but also for civil society organisations that deal with human rights and political governance issues. To validate this claim, a careful examination and discussion of online content from selected news media and civic organisations is done. The paper also gives close attention to new media infrastructure, the regulatory environment, quality of service provision for Internet and mobile phones, and other challenges facing new media users in Zimbabwe. In terms of Internet and mobile phone access, Zimbabwe is one of the countries in Africa with a very high rating and the fastest growth rate. The main argument in my paper is that since the political crisis in Zimbabwe, the public sphere for free expression, political debate, lobbying, has seemingly disappeared in the media and civil society. However, it seems as if the same struggles for free expression have re-inverted themselves and now find expression through the new media as evidenced by the seemingly unprecedented mushrooming of online activities by the media and civic organisations since 2000.
As is typical of most societies in conflict/crisis, since 2000 the government of Zimbabwe has increased legal pressure, imprisonment, and other forms of harassment that severely curtail the ability of the “independent” media to report freely. The paper starts by addressing the issue of legal pressure. It tests the reasonableness/otherwise of the Zimbabwean media laws through an analysis of the relevant international, regional and domestic human rights instruments. A scrutiny of the domestic judicial pronouncements on freedom of expression cases in this period will also be made. The second part will highlight strategic interventions and support to victims of media violations and criminalization of media work in this era. It commends the Zimbabwean media practitioners for the international publicity that the Zimbabwean crisis continues to enjoy despite the alleged siege. The third part cynically classifies the current Zimbabwean media into two categories- state and opposition – with the state media working for the government and the “independent” indirectly championing the opposition cause. The paper notes that the independent media tend to focus on the most hostile (perhaps for commercial purposes) aspects of the crisis and give little attention to any positive or peace building efforts. It calls for a third media voice that would adopt a conflict resolving approach.