Reporting drought: framing an anthropogenic natural disaster in the South African mainstream publication, City Press, over three years (2015-2018)
- Authors: Matyobeni, Thandiwe
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: City Press , City Press -- Criticism, Textual , Droughts -- South Africa , Mass media and the environment -- South Africa , Climatic changes in mass media -- South Africa , Press -- South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/143179 , vital:38208
- Description: This study interrogates how the ongoing anthropogenic drought, declared a disaster in five South African provinces in 2015, has been represented by mainstream news media. The news media enables public participation which is vital to climate action and the regulation of harmful neoliberal practices that fuel climate change and are thus necessary to provide information about climate change and to support political interventions. Despite the gravity of the drought crisis, there is a severe lack of public opinion about it and the complex weather patterns to which it is attributed. This study thus investigates how the drought has been framed by mainstream news media in South Africa, confining itself to a single title, the City Press. To analyse representations of drought in the City Press, this study adopts a Foucauldian approach to discourse which considers representations as meaning constructed through language. The knowledge perpetuated in news texts is thus frequently perceived as the ‘truth’ about the drought. This knowledge is imbued with power as those in positions of authority determine what is articulated as truth. Through various institutional practices, journalists limit what is said about the drought, framing it in particular ways and privileging particular voices. What the public learns about the drought (and in turn, climate change) is thus limited by the norms and routines of the journalistic regime and the corporate nature of ownership. Notably, the City Press operates within the neoliberal economic order to which climate change is attributed. This study is located within the Cultural Studies and Journalism Studies paradigms and is further informed by a qualitative methodology and two methods of textual analysis, that is, thematic analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis. The sampling process produced a database of 26 news texts published by the City Press between the years 2015 to 2018. Five texts were purposively selected for an in-depth analysis based on a broad thematic analysis as reasonably representative of the discourses that recur. Although the City Press positions itself as a critical purveyor of political information, only three themes recur in the texts. These themes position drought in relation to the agricultural economy and urban infrastructure; foreground the voices of corporate entities; while the climate science behind weather patterns is inadequately interpreted. Any discussion of climate change and alternatives to mainstream economic practices is almost entirely omitted.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Matyobeni, Thandiwe
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: City Press , City Press -- Criticism, Textual , Droughts -- South Africa , Mass media and the environment -- South Africa , Climatic changes in mass media -- South Africa , Press -- South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/143179 , vital:38208
- Description: This study interrogates how the ongoing anthropogenic drought, declared a disaster in five South African provinces in 2015, has been represented by mainstream news media. The news media enables public participation which is vital to climate action and the regulation of harmful neoliberal practices that fuel climate change and are thus necessary to provide information about climate change and to support political interventions. Despite the gravity of the drought crisis, there is a severe lack of public opinion about it and the complex weather patterns to which it is attributed. This study thus investigates how the drought has been framed by mainstream news media in South Africa, confining itself to a single title, the City Press. To analyse representations of drought in the City Press, this study adopts a Foucauldian approach to discourse which considers representations as meaning constructed through language. The knowledge perpetuated in news texts is thus frequently perceived as the ‘truth’ about the drought. This knowledge is imbued with power as those in positions of authority determine what is articulated as truth. Through various institutional practices, journalists limit what is said about the drought, framing it in particular ways and privileging particular voices. What the public learns about the drought (and in turn, climate change) is thus limited by the norms and routines of the journalistic regime and the corporate nature of ownership. Notably, the City Press operates within the neoliberal economic order to which climate change is attributed. This study is located within the Cultural Studies and Journalism Studies paradigms and is further informed by a qualitative methodology and two methods of textual analysis, that is, thematic analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis. The sampling process produced a database of 26 news texts published by the City Press between the years 2015 to 2018. Five texts were purposively selected for an in-depth analysis based on a broad thematic analysis as reasonably representative of the discourses that recur. Although the City Press positions itself as a critical purveyor of political information, only three themes recur in the texts. These themes position drought in relation to the agricultural economy and urban infrastructure; foreground the voices of corporate entities; while the climate science behind weather patterns is inadequately interpreted. Any discussion of climate change and alternatives to mainstream economic practices is almost entirely omitted.
- Full Text:
Zimbabwean women online: an investigation of how gendered identities are negotiated in Zimbabwean women’s online spaces
- Authors: Ndlovu, Nonhlanhla
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: Woman -- Zimbabwe -- Social life and customs Social media -- Social aspects -- Zimbabwe Facebook (Firm) Women -- Zimbabwe
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/140452 , vital:37890
- Description: This study is concerned with the construction of Zimbabwean women’s identities in this contemporary internet age. Two Facebook groups are of particular interest here due to the vibrant conversations that take place on a daily basis, that is, Makhox Women’s League and Baking & Cooking: ZW Women’s Diaries. Conceiving these internet sites as discursive spaces, I unpack the contesting discourses and tensions in the different narratives offered by Zimbabwean women and identify and critique the competing sets of feminine subjectivities. I achieve this by drawing on poststructuralist and postcolonialist feminist theories in order to situate these groups as cultural sites that are particularly identity defining. I particularly draw on Foucauldian theories of discourse, power and the subject to conceptualise the formation of particular discursive gendered subjectivities. With an understanding that discourse is constitutive of power relations and contestations, and that discourse should be historically contextualised in order to take into account particular conditions of existence; I draw on Mamdani’s (1996) conceptualisation of how power is organised in Africa within a historical and institutional context, and identify the bifurcated nature of the postcolonial Zimbabwean state as a colonial residue as necessitating a particular kind of subjectivity. To this end, one can understand the different femininities on Makhox Women’s League and Baking & Cooking: ZW Women’s Diaries as constituted within, and complexly negotiating, a traditional/customary discourse and a rights-based modern one. This qualitative inquiry is informed by an eclectic approach that combines methods of textual analysis that complements both critical linguistics and media studies and attends to lexical structure as well as narrative and rhetorical analysis respectively. Combined with an online ethnographic approach I employ these tools to analyse these particular Facebook groups with the understanding that as women converse daily on these platforms, they ‘govern’ each other’s conduct and thought processes in interesting ways. I argue that these conversations discursively constitute the performances of different femininities on both sites that also take into account the diasporic condition of Zimbabwean women. I show how they negotiate and mediate feminine performance and in so doing propose and contest certain ‘truths’ that are frequently validated.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Ndlovu, Nonhlanhla
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: Woman -- Zimbabwe -- Social life and customs Social media -- Social aspects -- Zimbabwe Facebook (Firm) Women -- Zimbabwe
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/140452 , vital:37890
- Description: This study is concerned with the construction of Zimbabwean women’s identities in this contemporary internet age. Two Facebook groups are of particular interest here due to the vibrant conversations that take place on a daily basis, that is, Makhox Women’s League and Baking & Cooking: ZW Women’s Diaries. Conceiving these internet sites as discursive spaces, I unpack the contesting discourses and tensions in the different narratives offered by Zimbabwean women and identify and critique the competing sets of feminine subjectivities. I achieve this by drawing on poststructuralist and postcolonialist feminist theories in order to situate these groups as cultural sites that are particularly identity defining. I particularly draw on Foucauldian theories of discourse, power and the subject to conceptualise the formation of particular discursive gendered subjectivities. With an understanding that discourse is constitutive of power relations and contestations, and that discourse should be historically contextualised in order to take into account particular conditions of existence; I draw on Mamdani’s (1996) conceptualisation of how power is organised in Africa within a historical and institutional context, and identify the bifurcated nature of the postcolonial Zimbabwean state as a colonial residue as necessitating a particular kind of subjectivity. To this end, one can understand the different femininities on Makhox Women’s League and Baking & Cooking: ZW Women’s Diaries as constituted within, and complexly negotiating, a traditional/customary discourse and a rights-based modern one. This qualitative inquiry is informed by an eclectic approach that combines methods of textual analysis that complements both critical linguistics and media studies and attends to lexical structure as well as narrative and rhetorical analysis respectively. Combined with an online ethnographic approach I employ these tools to analyse these particular Facebook groups with the understanding that as women converse daily on these platforms, they ‘govern’ each other’s conduct and thought processes in interesting ways. I argue that these conversations discursively constitute the performances of different femininities on both sites that also take into account the diasporic condition of Zimbabwean women. I show how they negotiate and mediate feminine performance and in so doing propose and contest certain ‘truths’ that are frequently validated.
- Full Text:
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