An interrogation of the representation of the San and Tonga ethnic ‘minorities’ in the Zimbabwean state-owned Chronicle, and the privately owned Newsday Southern Edition/Southern Eye newspapers during 2013

Mlotshwa, Khanyile Joseph

Title: An interrogation of the representation of the San and Tonga ethnic ‘minorities’ in the Zimbabwean state-owned Chronicle, and the privately owned Newsday Southern Edition/Southern Eye newspapers during 2013
Creator: Mlotshwa, Khanyile Joseph
Subject: The Chronicle (Zimbabwe)
Subject: Newsday Southern Edition/Southern Eye (Zimbabwe)
Subject: Mass media and ethnic relations -- Zimbabwe
Subject: Mass media -- Political aspects -- Zimbabwe
Subject: Mass media and nationalism -- Zimbabwe
Subject: Minorities and journalism -- Zimbabwe
Subject: Press and politics -- Zimbabwe
Subject: San (African people) -- Social conditions
Subject: Tonga (Zambezi people) -- Social conditions
Subject: Critical discourse analysis
Date Issued: 2015
Date: 2015
Type: Thesis
Type: Masters
Type: MA
Identifier: vital:3549
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1018546
Description: This study critically interrogates representations of the San and Tonga in the Chronicle and the NewsDay Southern Edition/Southern Eye newspapers in 2013. It makes sense of how these representations and the journalistic practices that underwrite them position the ethnic groups as ‘minorities’ - in relation to other ethnic groups - within the discourses of Zimbabwean nationalism. Underpinned by a constructionist approach (Hall, 1997), the study makes sense of the San and Tonga identities otherwise silenced by the “bi-modal” (Ndlovu- Gatsheni, 2012: 536; Masunungure, 2006) Shona/Ndebele approach to Zimbabwean nationalism. In socio-historic terms, the study is located within the re-emergence of ‘ethnicity’ to contest Zimbabwean nationalism(s) during debates for the New Constitution leading to a Referendum in March 2013. The thesis draws on social theories that offer explanatory power in studying media representations, which include postcolonial (Bhabha, 1990, 1994; Spivak, 1995), hegemony (Gramsci, 1971), and discourse (Foucault, 1970, 1972; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) theories. These theories speak to the ways in which discourses about identity, belonging, citizenship and democracy are constructed in situations in which unequal social power is contested. The thesis links journalism practice with the politics of representation drawing on normative theories of journalism (Christians et al, 2009), the professional ideology of journalism (Tuchman, 1972; Golding and Elliot, 1996; Hall et al., 1996), and the concept of journalists as an ‘interpretive community’ (Zelizer, 1993). These theories allow us to unmask the role of journalism’s social power in representation, and map ways in which the agency of the journalists has to be considered in relation to the structural features of the media industry in particular, and society in general. The study is qualitative and proceeds by way of combining a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 1992; Richardson, 2007) and ideological analysis (Thompson, 1990) of eight news texts taken from the two newspapers and in-depth interviews with 13 journalists from the two newspapers. This way we account for the media representations journalists produced: sometimes reproducing stereotypes, at other times, resisting them. Journalists not only regard themselves as belonging to the dominant ethnic groups of Shona or Ndebele, but as part of the middle class; they take Zimbabwean nationalism for granted, reproducing it as common-sense through sourcing patterns dominated by elites. This silences the San and Tonga constructing them as a ‘minority’ through a double play of invisibility and hyper visibility, where they either don’t appear in the news texts or are overly stereotyped.
Format: 128 leaves
Format: pdf
Publisher: Rhodes University
Publisher: Faculty of Humanities, Journalism and Media Studies
Language: English
Rights: Mlotshwa, Khanyile Joseph

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