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Analysis
of coverage of women politicians by the print media in Zimbabwe
Women in Politics
Support Unit (WiPSU)
January 2003
General Overview
of Coverage
Below
is a statistical analysis of the coverage:
- A total of
20 articles were published in the 4 months
- 17 articles
covered Members of Parliament including the Ministers/ Deputy
Minster and the Governor
- 3 articles
covered women Councilors
- 9 out of
the 16 Members of Parliament were covered
- 3 out of
the 46 urban women councilors were covered
The women parliamentarians
can be divided into four broad categories, i.e. Ministers and Deputy
Minister, the Governor, the Deputy Speaker of Parliament and Members
of Parliament who do not hold another post. The statistical information
on the coverage in relation to these broad categories is as follows:
- 1 of the
17 articles referred to the Deputy Speaker
- 7 of the
17 articles referred to women Ministers and the Deputy Minister
in their official capacity
- 6 of the
articles referred to the Governor
- 4 of the
17 articles referred to Members of Parliament who do not hold
another portfolio
- 2 of the
3 articles on women councilors covered the Deputy Mayors of Harare
and Bulawayo respectively.
The statistical
information above leads to a number of conclusions. The Governor
of Manicaland, Oppah Muchinguri, is the most newsworthy woman politician.
She is the only woman Governor in Zimbabwe. 33% of all the articles
published involved her. 5 of the articles were on issues she dealt
with in her capacity as the Manicaland Governor. The second most
newsworthy group are the women Ministers and the Deputy Minister.
Again, the articles were of the women in their official capacity.
However, the coverage of women Ministers is quite low considering
that Zimbabwe has 4 Ministers and 1 Deputy Minister. There was an
article on at least each of them but the most covered woman Minister
is Flora Bhuka, the Minister of State for the Land Reform Programme
who is also the Chairperson of the Parliamentary Women’s Caucus.
This is probably due to the fact that the land reform process is
a top government agenda and therefore a topical issue in the political,
social and economic sectors. The media does not appear to regard
women Councilors as newsworthy because only 3 articles referred
to them.
One positive
issue was the use of photographs by the newspapers. Of the 21 reports,
19 of them had photographs of the women concerned. A photograph
in a newspaper makes an article more eye-catching and appealing
to the reader. It also gives a face and profile of the person concerned.
The reports’
focus was wide and varied. The women were covered in relation to
their official duties, (this relates more to the Ministers and the
Governor), in relation to their constituency work, in Parliamentary
Debates, in their personal lives, and in relation to their political
parties. One report focused on a ‘clash’ between two of the women
politicians.
Not all the
newspapers cited above published reports on the women politicians.
The breakdown of the reports according to the papers is:
- The Daily
News, published 11 out of 20, i.e. 55%
- The Daily
Mirror published 7 out of 20, i.e. 35%
- The Herald
published 1 out of 20, i.e. 5%
- The Weekend
Tribune Published 1 out of 20, i.e. 5%
There is a great
challenge for the papers to report more on women and for those who
have not to question their own internal policies and their views on
women and their political participation. Even for the Daily News the
figures are not impressive because it means they published an average
of only 3 articles on women in politics and decision making a month.
Women’s issues are a long way to go before they are realized to be
of national importance.
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