The Private and Government Sides of Tanzanian Journalists

Abstract

This article presents the evolution of Tanzania’s media with particular focus on the period of indigenous government control before the recent shift from such control to private ownership. While the history of the media is interesting in and of itself, it is presented to establish the journalistic ideology into which Tanzanian media practitioners were socialized as the result of the country’s adoption, upon receiving independence, of a one-party political system and a socialist economic system. This media history serves as a backdrop for the empirical portion of this paper. Using type of ownership (government, party, and private) as a classifying variable, the empirical study then captures Tanzanian journalists’ opinion profile with regard to private and government media traits. The journalistic ideology of the controlled period, wherein media played a role in national development, is apparent particularly in journalists’ attribution of traits to government and private media: The former will unify and develop the country; the latter will develop an informed citizenry but also be sensationalistic and unethical. Not surprisingly, in some instances, the assignment of traits to government and private media was related to ownership of place of employment of the respondents.