Selection and silence: contesting meanings of land in Zimbabwean media

Abstract

The tense political environment of the late 1990s, in which the Zimbabwean government was confronted with a more vocal civil society and a new political party, set the stage for the introduction of a new private newspaper, The Daily News. This paper posed for the fi rst time a serious challenge to the long-standing monopoly of the government-controlled daily newspaper, The Herald. This article compares and analyses how these two daily newspapers have represented the widespread land occupations in Zimbabwe, which gained momentum in early 2000. It argues that media representations of the land question in the run-up to the June 2000 parliamentary elections came to parallel the polarised political environment, thereby missing chances for a serious and more subtle debate on the land issue in the Zimbabwean media.