Reconceptualizing journalists under captured patrimonial media systems as a fractured interpretive community: The case of Zimbabwe

Abstract

Journalists within a nation are often described as members of the same interpretive community, especially in liberal Western democracies where their working environments are characterized by stable democratic conditions. This is helped by a sense of cooperation between the news media and the state. Conditions are different in post-colonial nations of the Global South, however, where the relationship between the news media and democracy is not fully developed. In fact, most of the Global South countries are at various democratization stages. They do not have the same levels of press freedom and autonomy as found in North America and Western Europe. As a result, not only are debates about press freedom fierce, but journalistic roles and ethical orientations are also hotly contested. These different journalistic conditions offer an opportunity to examine how journalists in the Global South operate as an interpretive community. Zimbabwe is one such country where journalists have been polarized for the past two decades, amidst press freedom contests. The study examines this debate by looking at Zimbabwean journalists as a fractured interpretive community rhetorically engaged with social interlocutors during key moments like World Press Freedom, newspaper closures, media policy debates, obituaries, and anniversary commemorations. Guided by theories of metajournalistic discourse, post- colonial theory and ubuntuism, textual analysis and interviews are used to examine points of convergence and divergence among Zimbabwean journalists and non-journalists on their conceptualization of press freedom and journalistic roles. This analysis advances general propositions not only about how journalistic interpretive communities operate, but also about how they operate in various contexts and what factors must be considered in understanding how journalistic interpretive communities come into being or get disintegrated.