Media Framing of COVID-19 in the Hybrid Democracies of Uganda and Tanzania

Ivan Nathanael Lukanda ； Gerald Walulya

《Taiwan Journal of Democracy》 17卷2期 (2021/12) Pp. 73-96

摘要

The threat and actual outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic was a newsworthy issue in East Africa, as was the case around the world. Using content analysis, the study examines how two newspapers framed the responses of political actors to managing and stopping the pandemic in the publications' respective countries. Based on the framing theory, the study focused on the online versions of two independent newspapers-The Citizen (Tanzania) and the Daily Monitor (Uganda)-with the objective of understanding the embedded motive in the response of the respective governments. The study focused on two hybrid democracies that took restrictive (Uganda) and liberal (Tanzania) approaches to combating the pandemic. It focused on the period starting the closure of the first international airport in East Africa (March 2020) to the re-opening of businesses in Uganda in July 2020. Results show that the lockdown, statistics, prevention, management, and economy frames were the most dominant in both Uganda and Tanzania as politicians in the hybrid regimes directly or indirectly addressed minimizing losses in official speeches as the countries headed for elections. Tanzania's press generally was dominated by foreign news sources, while Uganda's press was dominated by official government sources. In both countries, COVID-19 was treated as a foreign disease, and the political environment acted as a frame within which newspaper operations were moved to present the pandemic in the ways in which they did.

關鍵字

COVID-19 ； democracy ； media framing ； politics ； Tanzania ； Uganda

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