What is it about?
The article investigates how media in Malawi covers recurring events that affect the society. The purpose is to appreciate if recurring events influence media coverage approaches.
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Why is it important?
The paper is so important to Journalism field because from the findings, traditional media in Malawi treat all issues as breaking and new. This is not supposed to be the case. Traditional media should be able to set the agenda. For instance the Bloodsuckers occurrence in Malawi has occurred more than 6 times and it is unprofessional to treat a reccurrence as a new thing. The media should take it from where they stopped last time. As shown in the article, most reporters who covered the 2017 occurrence were new journalists who were not practising when the past one occurred. However, all the editors have witnessed more than four occurrences. This combination of old and new experiences should enable the media to set an agenda particularly in issues such as Bloodsuckers whose occurrences are mysterious in nature.
Perspectives
This is an important paper to all media personnel and it pushes us back to the roots of journalism of not forgetting background in our articles and how to look at different issues. The media has a purpose to serve and journalists are human beings with societal frames. So, where should they draw a line between these frames and media frames in order to serve the society better? This is the challenge. And in cases of events that are mysterious in nature to an extent that even the media can't spell out the very true, how should they be handled? These are some of the issues being provoked in the paper and they require more answers than as covered in the paper. Atleast, this paper gives us a starting point.
Albert Sharra
University of the Witwatersrand
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: “Vampires in the News”: A Critical Analysis of News Framing in Malawi’s Newspapers, African Journalism Studies, October 2019, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/23743670.2019.1656662.
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