1. Key Words Gender mainstreaming Objectivity News Values Balance
Journalistic Routine
Professionalism

2. Period February 13 to 13 August 2009
Consummation of GNU
High expectation within general polity
Cabinet appointments highly anticipated
Article XX of GPA “Framework for a news govt” instructive on allocation of cabinet posts
Calls for gender parity “particularly on the need to appoint women to strategic cabinet posts”
Analysis of newspapers’ coverage of GNU particularly cabinet post allocation

3. Journalistic Practice and gender exclusion
Scholars suggest that it is in the definition of newsworthiness, particular angles and style, professional norms and values that the masculine nature of journalism expresses itself (van Zoonen: 1998:35)
Journalists valorise the masculine nature of news by their claim that news is news it doesn’t involve gender
They argue that news production, in its vey essence, is professional and non-gender specific
This argument is buttressed by the claims to objectivity where journalists claim that they shelve their subjectivities and think professionally when writing stories.

4. Journalistic practice and gender exclusion cont...
Exclusion of women from news is justified as a ‘true reflection’ of the phenomenon being covered.
There are no attempts to redefine issues of balance, professionalism and objectivity so that they incorporate gender
No balance in the sense of balancing a male and female point of view.

5. Appointment of cabinet ministers and gender exclusion
This subject forms the central part of this presentation. Expectations were that the principals would be guided by Article xx of the GPA and that the media would centre their analysis on this provision Only five women out of 36 cabinet ministers Given ministries of: 1. Women’s affairs, gender and community dvt, (2) Small and medium enterprises and cooperative dvt, (3) Labour, (4) Public works and (5) Regional and International cooperation

6. Appointment of cabinet ministers and gender exclusion

7. Reasons for lack of interest in the gender aspect of cabinet allocation
Carried out interviews with story writers and carried out analysis of themes covered to come up with the reasons 1. Objectivity and professionalism: Donald had this to say, Journalists carry out their work objectively and professionally thus they do not create issues if those issues are not coming out of the public. We don’t create news, we objectively cover issues that we think are newsworthy thus if there were sentiments implying that women were let down in the allocation of cabinets posts, then we could have captured them, certainly it was not up to us to say so if the women were quiet about it”

8. Reasons for lack of interest in the gender aspect of cabinet allocation cont…
Pre0ccupation with male-to-male conflict Evidence from most of the paper headlines indicated that reportage around the GNU centred on conflict This conflict was mainly between male figures in Zimbabwean politics. Below are some of the paper headlines

9. Preoccupation with masculine conflict
Conflict, while its known to sell as news, was mainly centred on male figures in the govt
Journalists justifying this by arguing that any conflict btn Mugabe and Tsvangirai is ‘big news’
However, one journo argues Zim journos concentrate on conflict because it’s easy to report on.
‘You don’t need to do research to establish that Madhuku said such and such negative things about Mugabe. Yet issues to do with gender need research and careful thought before one writes. For example, most journos don’t know about article xx of the GPA, how then do you expect them to do an analysis based on the article.

10. Event based Journalism
Because of the lack of capacity to do thematic appreciation of issues, journalists do event-based journalism often following up on male political ‘celebrities’ to report on everything they do or say.
Below are some of the headlines to illustrate this

11. Event-based journalism cont..
Most journalists preoccupied with press conferences for news and in a country where most of the government officials are men, most of the news from these press conferences are centred on these men.
Everything that Mugabe or Tsvangirai says is considered news and their pictures are permanent features on every newspaper’s pages
As noted earlier this is largely dependent on a poorly educated journalistic human resource that can’t go into thematic reporting and deep analysis of issues simply because the technical expertise is not there.

12. Gender exclusion: What needs to be done?
1 Redefining news values, objectivity, balance and professionalism
2 Use a business approach to fight gender exclusion in the media-Need to convince media owners that women constitute a large potential market for their product
Need to emphasise that gender mainstreaming is a good business practice and that to simply ignore this market by pursuing masculine approaches towards news coverage is a bad business approach .
Convince senior management that they miss out on big business if they continue leaving out women issues in their media products.
Deconstruct myths about women issues not able to sell newspapers

13. Gender exclusion: What needs to be done?
3 Make the media aware that gender exclusion is an affront on media diversity 4 Expanding understanding of human rights and freedom of expression