The Reproduction of Power and Jargon in COVID-19 Coverage in Zambian Media: An Analysis of the Zambia Daily Mail and Mwebantu

Abstract

ABSTRACT During health pandemics such as the globally menacing COVID-19, the news media act as primary sources of information for the majority of the population. However, due to the novelty of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a dearth of studies in Zambia and Africa that explore the coverage of the pandemic in local media. This article employs Foucauldian discourse as theoretical lens to analyse the representation of the COVID-19 pandemic in two selected media platforms—the Zambia Daily Mail and Mwebantu.com. Purposively selected stories on the COVID-19 pandemic were subjected to a Foucauldian discourse analysis in order to unpack language, power and knowledge struggles in the coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in selected Zambian media outlets. Findings show that both Zambia Daily Mail and Mwebantu were hardly analytical and critical in their coverage of the pandemic. The two publications simply regurgitated statistics on numbers of infections, recoveries, and mortality rate as announced by government officials, albeit with minimum effort to digest and unpack complex discourses for the “ordinary” reader. Moreover, in both publications, public health experts and government officials were “privileged” to authorise meanings and “truths” about COVID-19.