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Remnants of Empire: British media reporting on Zimbabwe
Wendy Willems
October, 2005

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In: Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, Special Issue on Zimbabwe

Introduction

Mudimbe (1988) examines how in earlier days navigators, traders, travellers, philosophers and anthropologists played an important role in shaping the modern meaning of Africa and of being African. Whereas Mudimbe stresses the crucial role of anthropology in representing Africa and Africans in the nineteenth century, Askew (2002, 1) argues that in the current age it is essentially the media who is doing the job formerly belonging to anthropologists. News accounts shape in decisive ways people's perceptions of the world.

Since early 2000, Zimbabwe has occupied an important place in both broadcast and print media in Britain. Foreign representations of Zimbabwe and British media coverage in particular, have been sharply criticised by the Zimbabwean government. Public debates, both at home and abroad, on the situation in Zimbabwe often were about representations of the crisis.

This paper discusses how Zimbabwe was represented in the British media, why it attracted so much attention and what responses British media coverage provoked from the Zimbabwean government. The analysis will emphasise the way in which Zimbabwe was reported in two British newspapers, namely The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph.1 It aims to give an impression of the nature of media reporting on Zimbabwe in Britain rather than to offer an exhaustive account, and will hence serve as a starting point for further investigations.2 In order to gain insights into the practices of news-making and journalism, I also conducted semi-structured interviews with foreign correspondents from various British newspapers and foreign news agencies. Although news is often portrayed as a reflection of reality, for example through the metaphor of a 'mirror', this paper will depart from the notion that news is always socially constructed, shaped by the particular context in which it is produced. It is, therefore, crucial to analyse the socio-political environment in which news stories are made.

Finally then, this paper will argue that the international media -and in particular the British media- have helped to create the conditions that allowed the Zimbabwean government to define the situation in Zimbabwe as a struggle against imperialism.

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