Political Journalism and Elections in Africa

Routledge Handbook of Public Policy in Africa, 2021

Ebonyi State University Journal of Media studies, 2023

Background: The relationship between mass media and governance in Africa is a complex interplay shaped by historical, political, economic and socio-cultural factors. This article explores the trajectories, expectations, and realities of mass media in governance in Africa, reflecting from its evolution to the contemporary digital age. Materials and Method: The exploratory approach adopted in the study, provides a broad understanding of the nuanced dynamics between mass media and governance in Africa. Expectations include the media's role in democratization, serving as watchdog, fostering civic engagement, and promoting diverse perspectives. Results: However, the reality reveals challenges such as government interference, economic pressures, and ethical dilemmas, influencing the media's impact on governance. Technological transformations, ethnic dynamics, and the role of media ethics further complicate this relationship. Conclusion: The study concludes that while there has been progress in diversifying the African media landscape, post-independence challenges and political instability hinder the media's ability to fully realize its potential as a catalyst for transparent, accountable, and effective governance. The study recommends strategic interventions to enhance press freedom, ensure economic sustainability, promote media literacy, regulate online content, foster diversity, invest in journalism education, and encourage public-private partnerships across African nations.

Hallmark University Journal of Management and Social Sciences , 2020

Nigeria commenced her present democratic experience in 1999. Twenty years down the line, it is imperative to carry out a critical evaluation of the roles played by each of the stakeholders, especially the press which is referred to by the 1999 Nigerian Constitution (as amended) as the fourth estate of the realm. The study was empirical and it adopted a qualitative method. Primary data were sourced through focus group discussion by engaging ten (10) journalists, spread across both print and electronic media in Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria. All the participants covered the2019 general elections in the study area. The objectives were to critically examine the roles played by journalists in deepening the nation's electoral process and to identify the challenges that confronted journalists in the discharge of their constitutional responsibility and to proffer solutions to the identified challenges against future elections. The study found out that journalists' roles as watchdogs during the elections conformed with the agenda setting theory in their coverage and reportage of the elections; pre-, during and post-election periods. Such factors as nonaccreditation of journalists by INEC, lack of insurance cover, insecurity as well as inadequate fund were some of the identified challenges that confronted journalists during the period of the elections. The study recommended that stakeholders, media owners, election umpire, and security agencies should be alive to their assigned responsibilities during future elections to make it easier for media professionals to discharge their duties.

Using Nigeria as a setting, this paper examined how media’s reportorial mistakes impact African electoral processes. Eight newspaper textual exemplars were theoretically sampled and presented in a titled textbox. The texts were subjected to analysis by means of the analytical resources that brim in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Discussion drew on reactions from the reporters who wrote the analyzed textual exemplars. Discussion also drew on comments about the 2013 Zimbabwe elections. Results are that questionable communication models tease African media into inaccuracies; and such inaccuracies are found as conniving at electoral abuses in Africa. Conclusion is that until the media snap out of their debilitating ineptitude, electoral outcomes in Africa will continue to be out of synch with the will of the electorates.

THE MEDIA AND THE CHALLENGES OF DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE IN NIGERIA, 2019

Over the past two decades, Sub-Saharan (simply ‘Africa’) has been partly transformed by the winds of democratic change (Diamond, 2010), sequel to the collapse of Soviet Unions in the 20th century. But democratic structures and processes in Nigeria’s history had suffered debilitating distortion, and in some cases, total destruction during theprolonged period of military incursion into politics, which prevailed continuously since 1966 till 1999 before the country returned to another civil rule in May 1999 (Asobie, 2005). In all these years of dictatorship, Nigerians through the media clamoured persistently for a free debate on the grand norms, the fundamental principles and, the basic structures that would constitute the foundation for the practice of democratic politics in a post military era. Meanwhile, the media systems in Africa are still as insecure and volatile as unstable political and social structures compared to the developed nations (Hutchten, 1971). Apparently, the roles and priorities of the media in a developed nation like United States of America can never be the same in a developing nation like Nigeria with a fledgling democracy- a nation still scrambling for its own identity in the comity of nations. However, the media as the Fourth Estate of the Realm carries an entrenched assumption that is often taken for granted. For not only is it made to appear as having constitutional backing, but also that our modern mass communication media as ‘neutral’ reporters and filters of news and information are an obvious necessity for democracy (Eziokwu, 2004), a condition for the nurturing and sustenance of democracy.

The media anywhere in the world are generally referred to as the "Fourth Estate of the Realm " and the "watchdog of the society" meaning that the media exist as an organ of information sourcing and dissemination, educational promotion, entertainment, surveillance, social enlightenment, political socialisation and mobilisation. These functions set the media apart as agents of political re-engineering and protector of democratic norms. This paper therefore evaluates the coverage of the new democratic Nigeria in the international media to determine the depth and nature of coverage gi. ven to this largest single democracy in Africa. Using the content analytical study method as the main source of facts generation and analysis, this paper discovers that the Nigerian state is still under reported in the interna tional press, years after the restoration of democratic governance. This paper therefore , suggests that African democracies should establish media organisations with global reach and penetration so that they can report themselves and avoid the current misrepresentation ofthe continent in the global space.

It is often assumed that a robust, free and independent media will contribute to the deepening of democracy by keeping governments accountable and broadening citizen participation in deliberative democratic debates. But in new democracies such as South Africa, the deepening and broadening of democratic participation is often curtailed by challenges such as unequal access to the media, the orientation of mainstream media towards elite audiences and renewed attempts by sources of power to control the free flow of information. Despite the promise of a peaceful, equitable and democratic society after the end of apartheid, conflicts continue to erupt due to continued social polarisation, vast socio-economic inequalities and new struggles for power. In South Africa these conflicts include social protests on a daily basis, repeated outbreaks of xenophobic violence and disruptions to the parliamentary process. This paper probes the role of the media in these conflicts from the perspective of journalists who have reported on these issues. The paper explores ways in which journalists critically reflect on their abilities to perform the roles expected of them within a normative framework informed by the Habermasian ideal of deliberative democracy. The reasons they offer for not fulfilling these roles, and the conditions underpinning these failures, lead them to question the ability of the South African media to contribute to an emerging democracy.

2008

The study critically examines the role played by the news media in a modern African democracy. The issues of democracy and the theories that drive them are mostly either Euro-centric or Anglo-American. The perspective offered by this thesis showed that Africa has a unique system which calls for a hybridised approach to the study of media and democracy. The functioning of a state-owned media, insulated from governmental control by the 1992 Ghana Constitution alongside privately-owned media is a phenomenon worth the undertaking. What the study has done was an engagement with normative theories of media and democracy to determine whether or not the news media and more particularly, the newspaper media contribute to democratic development of Ghana. In this context, a comparative analytical study of the Daily Graphic and the Ghanaian Chronicle, state and private entities respectively, underpinned the enquiry into the possible influences on elections, checks on democratic accountability a...

Political Communication in Africa (Springer, Cham), 2017

This chapter uses a content analysis of headlines and the “African news” sections of national newspapers of five African states, one from each of the five subregions, and a focus group discussion with six Nigerian journalists to contextualize the role of the African media in (un)shaping perception about the continent. The chapter argues that the bleak picture of the continent that the African media peddles through its overwhelming emphasis on negative news and subjective reportage of the activities of African governments to its national and international publics serve largely to water the seeds of internal discord and Afro-pessimism. It can therefore be argued that the African mass media has continued to contribute to the pessimistic imaging of Africa through its one-sided reportage of the continent. This has far-reaching consequences for not only democratic sustenance but also Africa’s human and economic development. The chapter suggests that in view of the power that communication wields over matters of political and economic development and the media’s role in this equation, the African mass media needs to awaken to the obligation of partnering with government to set and nurture societal goals and aspirations, articulating a shared vision of progress for both the state and the continent

2011

DECLARATION iii CONTACT DETAILS iii ACKNOWLDGEMENT iv DEDICATION v TABLE OF CONTENTS viii WORKING DEFINITION OF TERMS xv CHAPTER 1 20 5.5.2 The Land theme and the Draft Constitution 5.5.2.1 The East African Standard Newspaper Coverage of the Land theme 5.5.2.2 The Nation Newspaper Coverage of the Land Theme 5.5.3 Political Utterances Theme from the Newspapers 5.5.4 The Political Conflict Theme as Captured by the Nation and East African Standard Newspapers 5.5.5 The Judiciary theme as published in the Nation and the East African Standard Newspapers 5.5.6 The East African Standard Newspaper Coverage of the Devolution Theme 5.5.7.2 The East African Standard Newspaper Coverage of the theme of Ethnicity 5.5.7.3 Nation Newspaper's Coverage of the Ethnicity theme 5.5.8 The theme of Bill of Rights as Covered by the Nation and the East African Standard Newspapers 5.5.9 The Newspapers' Coverage of the Executive theme 5.6 The Impact of News Content on Different Levels of Political Conflicts 5.3.1 Demographic Information on the influence of Newspaper Content on Political Conflicts 5.6.1Popular Sections in a Newspaper 5.6.2 Respondents' Preferred Newspaper 5.6.3 The Gender of the Respondents and the side they supported during the referendum 5.6.4 The Age Group of Respondents and the side they supported during the referendum 5.7 Newspaper Content and Its Influence on the Different Levels of Political Conflict 5.7.1 Views on the relationship between articles on how the draft constitution was not good for the larger ethnic groups and political conflict 5.7.2 Respondents' Views on the impact of differences between Politicians 5.4.1 The Influence of Newspaper Content on Politicians 5.7.3 Respondents' Views on how newspaper content Influenced readers WORKING DEFINITION OF TERMS Attitudes: These are perceptions that are adopted by a group of people on specific subjects such as the draft constitution. Agenda Setting: When the media sets the issues that are discussed in the media and in the public sphere.

BC Third World LJ, 1986

Media Coverage of The 2016 Presidential Elections In Zambia: A Content Analysis Of The Zambia Daily Mail, New Vision And Daily Nation Newspapers, 2019

This study is a content analysis of the state-owned Zambia Daily Mail and private-owned New Vision and Daily Nation's coverage of the 2016 presidential elections in Zambia. Principles of quantitative and qualitative analysis were blended to come up with the rich data presented in the study. The principal goal of the study was to examine on how the media, both state and private, covered the 2016 presidential elections with focus on the election coverage in terms of tone, fairness and dominance of stories. The study utilized the framing and agenda setting theories as the bases for the analysis of the stories. Data from interview questionnaires came from the public and private media personnel of a population size of 5 media respondents for qualitative content analysis. From newspapers, data came from a population size of all newspaper articles published by the Zambia Daily Mail, New Vision and Daily Nation newspapers, with a sample of 108 articles identified and 167 stories analyzed from a constructed week within the study period (May to August 2016) for analysis. Excel data analysis was used to enter the data by coders and analyze findings. The data from these research tools was content and thematically analyzed within the context of literature review and the analytical framework adopted from Media framing and Agenda setting theories. Purposive sampling method was used to select respondents while stratified sampling method was used to select news articles. The findings indicated that despite the ideological differences of each newspaper audience, all the newspapers offered a similar coverage of elections. There was a correlation with newspaper content analysis and media survey analysis in which Hakainde Hichilema and Edgar Chagwa Lungu had more coverage including their political parties. Bias and subjectivity were evident in the number and type of stories, the number and type of pictures and accompanying captions, the number of stories about contesting presidential candidates and the usage of language (dominant tone) in the stories. Other findings based on self-administered questionnaires indicated that violence against journalists was one of the major stumbling blocks in coverage of elections and coverage was adversely affected by lack of both financial and human resources especially by the private media. This void of substantial news coverage undermines a newspaper's vital function. Furthermore, less substantive stories limit newspapers in their framing and agenda setting role. From the findings, the study recommends that the media must take deliberate measures to increase the coverage of topics relevant to citizens' choices of who and which party to vote for. The media must avoid the influence of commercialization of news and pressure to generate profit which push the media to preference 'horse-race' coverage as 'Profit making' kind of coverage which leave journalists open to accusations of bias, the media should also be neutral and not being pro-government in its functionality as watchdog and mediator between the people and the government. Finally, media freedom should be exercised by the ruling government so as not to discourage reporters and editors for fear of being raided by the ruling party.