The democratic deficit in reporting political crises: The case of Zimbabwe’s 2018 elections

Although our impression of the media’s role in a democracy and democratising societies is fairly stable, the situation is fundamentally different under unstable and ever shifting conditions of political crisis. To explore dynamics in the latter scenario we analyse the coverage of Zimbabwe’s 2018 elections by the country’s daily newspapers. This allows us to examine the newspapers’ active role in shaping the conditions of crisis through their interpretation and evaluation of issues and events during the period under study. We use frame and rhetoric analytical tools to analyse front-page stories and editorials, which enables us to explore the dimensions of news media’s agency during the context of crisis and assess the nature and direction of such agency using normative theories of the media in a democracy. We argue that a political crisis can easily polarise news media and subsequently induce them into assuming an active partisan posture in their reportage of political issues and events by using rhetorical discursive strategies not only to persuade the audience to accept their standpoint, but subsequently, to influence their political action in the future, with consequential implications for their functional performance of received normative roles.