Abstract
The political communication landscape in Zambia has experienced a difficult trajectory following the country’s return to democracy in 1991, after Kenneth Kaunda’s 27-year rule ended. This is evident when the role of the media in Zambia’s democratic dispensation is juxtaposed with the attitudes of parliamentarians towards the press. Pitts’s 1997 seminal study examined this phenomenon. He posited that although multi-party elections in 1991 produced a democratically elected government and brought increased freedoms for the media, the values shaped by the experiences of parliamentarians were also important to understanding the Zambian system of press freedom. The study concluded that Zambia’s leaders may have to experience intergenerational value changes to overcome the past if they are to view press freedom from a more libertarian perspective. To form a longitudinal base from which to analyse parliamentarians’ attitudes towards the press and how they have changed over time, longitudinal survey data from 1997 to 2015 has been collected. The questions addressed include: (1) Given Africa’s history of strict government regulation of the media prior to the democratisation tide of the early 1990s, what were parliamentarians’ perceptions of media regulation in Zambia from 1997 to 2015? (2) Has support for press freedom among parliamentarians, which is intrinsically linked to democracy, increased over the years? (3) What do parliamentarians think about news reporting by various media outlets in Zambia? Do they consider the reports of television, newspapers, radio and online providers to be fair and accurate? (4) Are parliamentarians familiar with online news sources and what are their perceptions of them? How do emerging media trends assist in contextualising political communication in Zambia. Using these questions as the baseline, the purpose of this chapter is to project and examine trends.
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Kasoma, T., Pitts, G. (2018). Mapping Zambia’s Press Freedom Trajectory: A Longitudinal Study Examining Parliamentarians’ Perceptions of the Media. In: Mutsvairo, B., Karam, B. (eds) Perspectives on Political Communication in Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62057-2_6
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