1st Edition

Press Silence in Postcolonial Zimbabwe News Whiteouts, Journalism and Power

By Zvenyika Eckson Mugari Copyright 2020
    314 Pages 38 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    314 Pages 38 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This book focuses on news silence in Zimbabwe, taking as a point of departure the (in)famous blank spaces (whiteouts) which newspapers published to protest official censorship policy imposed by the Rhodesian government from the mid-1960s to the end of that decade.

    Based on archived news content, the author investigates the cause(s) of the disappearance of blank spaces in Zimbabwe’s newspapers and establishes whether and how the blank spaces may have been continued by stealth and proposes a model of doing journalism where news is inclusive, just and less productive of blank spaces. The author explores the broader ramifications of news silences, tacit or covert on society’s sense of the world and their place in it. It questions whether and how news media continued with the practice of epistemic deletions and continue to draw on the colonial archive for conceptual maps with which to define and interpret contemporary postcolonial realities and challenges in Zimbabwe.

    This book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and academics researching the press in contemporary Africa, critical media analysis, media and society studies, and news as discourse.

    Chapter 1. Colonial Foundations of Press Silence in Zimbabwe

    Chapter 2. Colonial Press and Intersecting Loci of Silencing

    Chapter 3. News Whiteouts Under Udi and After

    Chapter 4. News Silence on Forced Removals Colonial Rhodesia

    Chaper 5. The Daily News And ‘Telling the Land Story Like It Is’

    Chapter 6. The Herald and Patriotic News on The Land Issue

    Chapter 7. Operation Restore (Colonial) Order

    Chapter 8. ‘Operation Restore Legacy’ In Post-Mugabe Era

    Chapter 9. Do-It-Yourself (DIY) News and The Emancipatory Promise

    Biography

    Zvenyika Eckson Mugari is Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Lecturer in the Media and Society Studies Department at the Midlands State University, Zimbabwe. He also holds a Research Fellowship with the Centre for Diversity Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.