Political Party Factionalism and Tabloidization in Zimbabwe

The Herald is a broadsheet newspaper, a large newspaper format written and distributed for a national audience on the basis of a national news agenda. The major aim of broadsheets is in-depth and comprehensive coverage, written using moderate and emotionally controlled language and focusing on an issue or substantive consequences of a story, rather than the first-hand human interest approach employed by tabloids. Through a textual analysis of its coverage of the expulsion of Joice Mujuru from the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party and government (2014‒2016) and the fall of Robert Mugabe (with specific focus on The Herald edition of November 22, 2017), this chapter argues that The Herald abandoned quality broadsheet journalism styles in its reportage and exhibited signs of tabloidization by resorting to tabloid formatting and styles such as personification, dramatization, trivialization, and sensationalism without analyzing the factual and constitutional manner in which ZANU-PF elects and removes its leaders. What is unique about the tabloidization of The Herald is that it was not informed by commercial imperatives that usually drive such a process or processes (Esser, European Journal of Communication 14:291–324, 1999; Kurtz, Media circus—The trouble with America’s Newspapers, Random House, 1993) but by external editorial control by a prevailing dominant ZANU-PF faction at every turn that ignored internal due processes of party administration. This kind of tabloidization poses a serious threat to the production of quality news and, more importantly, it seems to be enduring and being accepted as “normal” practice in the public media including the electronic media. Without the safeguards of direct control by government and party officials, the public media such as The Herald remain susceptible to control by powerful factions of the party in power and fail to serve the public through public interest journalism. The net effect of such a seemingly enduring scenario is that citizens will further lose interest in mainstream media.