Recent years have seen considerable growth in the media in Africa with increases in the number of newspapers and radio and television stations. At the same time there has been an increase in the number of arrests of journalists and broadcasters and various forms of censorship have been introduced. The essays in this volume examine press censorship, past and present, and bring a fresh perspective to the position of the mass media in the African continent.
This edited collection is a cutting-edge volume that reframes political communication from an African perspective. Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa and occasionally drawing comparisons with other regions of the world, this book critically addresses the development of the field focusing on the current opportunities and challenges within the African context. By using a wide variety of case studies that include Mozambique, Zambia, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, Ivory Coast and Nigeria, the collection gives space to previously understudied regions of sub-Saharan Africa and challenges the over-reliance of western scholarship on political communication on the continent.
The Quest for Press Freedom is a book about press development and freedom in Ethiopia, with a focus on the state media. It examines the building of a modern media institution over the last one hundred years of its existence, and the restrictions against its freedoms. The significance of this work lies in its originality and that it addresses these two issues across three distinct epochs: the monarchy era, the Marxist military regime, and the current ethnic federalist regime. The book examines the political and social situations in each of these periods, and analyzes the effects they had on the media. The book also provides examples of how journalists working for the government-run media have a strong desire to exercise their constitutional right to press freedom. In the final chapter, Reta offers recommendations for a more viable media system in Ethiopia.
This timely book explores how the internet and social media have permanently altered the media landscape, enabling new actors to enter the marketplace, and changing the way that news is generated, published and consumed. It examines the importance of citizen journalists, whose newsgathering and publication activities have made them crucial to public discourse and central actors in the communication revolution. Investigating how the internet and social media have enabled citizen journalism to flourish, and what this means for the traditional institutional press, the public sphere, and media freedom, the book demonstrates how communication and legal theory are applied in practice.
Journalism and Mass Communication in Africa provides the first in-depth analysis of the evolution of mass communication and the impact of new media technologies in Cameroon. Written and edited by African scholars, this volume maps out the changing media ecology of Cameroon and provides practical survey methods for communication research. The work details the impact mass public communication has had on the empowerment of Cameroon's 15 million people and the development of grassroots participatory democracy.
While transitioning from autocracy to democracy, media in Africa has always played an important role in democratic and non-democratic states; focusing on politicians, diplomats, activists, and others who work towards political transformations. New Media Influence on Social and Political Change in Africa addresses the development of new mass media and communication tools and its influence on social and political change. While analyzing democratic transitions and cultures with a theoretical perspective, this book also presents case studies and national experiences for media, new media, and democracy scholars and practitioners.
What is the role of the media in Africa? How do they work? How do they interact with global media? How do they reflect and express local culture? Incorporating both African and international perspectives, Media and Identity in Africa demonstrates how media outlets are used to perpetuate, question, or modify the unequal power relations between Africa and the rest of the world. Discussions about the construction of old and new social entities which are defined by class, gender, ethnicity, political and economic differences, wealth, poverty, cultural behavior, language, and religion dominate these new assessments of communications media in Africa. This volume addresses the tensions between the global and the local that have inspired creative control and use of traditional and modern forms of media.
For the first decade of the twenty-first century, every weekend, people throughout Uganda converged to participate in ebimeeza, open debates that invited common citizens to share their political and social views. These debates, also called “People’s Parliaments,” were broadcast live on private radio stations until the government banned them in 2009. In Talkative Polity, Florence Brisset-Foucault offers the first major study of ebimeeza, which complicate our understandings of political speech in restrictive contexts and force us to move away from the simplistic binary of an authoritarian state and a liberal civil society. Brisset-Foucault conducted fieldwork from 2005 to 2013, primarily in Kampala, interviewing some 150 orators, spectators, politicians, state officials, journalists, and NGO staff. The resulting ethnography invigorates the study of political domination and documents a short-lived but highly original sphere of political expression. Brisset-Foucault thus does justice to the richness and depth of Uganda’s complex political and radio culture as well as to the story of ambitious young people who didn’t want to behave the way the state expected them to. Positioned at the intersection of media studies and political science, Talkative Polity will help us all rethink the way in which public life works.
This work deals with the relations between public communications and politics in the context of the nation-state system in Africa. It interweaves theory and practice, and begins with an overview that presents a general theoretical model of communication and influence processes in politics.
