Covering COVID-19 in the Global South: Political Position-Taking among Ugandan Journalists

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study contributes to the study of news production in authoritarian systems by examining the signals of field position embedded in news content about a global crisis produced by journalists in a semi-authoritarian state in the Global South. Field theory proposes that organizations and individual actors in a field take specific positions based on their assessment of the available options and strategic awareness of other organizations’ positionality. With this perspective, I compare the position-taking practices of the two most prominent Ugandan newspapers—the independent Daily Monitor and the government-aligned New Vision—in reporting about COVID-19 during early 2020. Using a computer-aided mixed-method corpus analysis of news stories (N = 3288), I examine the most commonly occurring words to draw conclusions about the ways these news outlets present the crisis. I find that, compared to the government-supported New Vision, the independent Daily Monitor covered the early pandemic in a more politically oriented way, while the New Vision tended to emphasize health communication and response. This suggests that, rather than taking directly opposing stances in the field, news outlets aligned with opposing political orientations may instead work symbiotically, with one fulfilling a watchdog-style role oriented toward political governance while the other fulfills more of a development-oriented role of ensuring public awareness and knowledge.