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The Making of an African Public Sphere |
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Written by Murej O Mak'Ochieng
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The Performance of the Kenyan Daily Press during the change to multi-party politics
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By Murej O. Mak'Ochieng (2000)
INTRODUCTION
In this study I am interested in investigating or assessing the performance of the daily press in an African country during a period of fundamental change in its political culture. This investigation will take the form of exploration and analysis of changes in the way two daily newspapers differentially performed in their coverage of (reporting) and commentary on the political transition in Kenya from a single party to a multi-party system. The decision for this study was influenced by two major reasons. Firstly, the strong prompting to argue and test the study’s major hypothesis that in Kenya, the country’s political culture and praxis , more than any other single variable, has contributed most to the pressures and influences that have constrained or enabled the performance of the press in the realm of politics. The opportunity to do this was afforded by the second reason; the socio-political process that led to the constitutional change in 1992, which established a multi-party political system in Kenya.The above proposition is important because since the time of the struggle for political independence, most media critics, politicians and government functionaries have explained the performance of the daily press mainly by reference to their ownership status. The details of these debates will be given below, especially in Chapter three. I have not come across a single study that has attempted empirically to explain the political performance of the Kenyan daily press by reference to her political culture. Most of the arguments in the debates on the performance of the media in Kenya have been informed, directly and/or indirectly, by the normative theory of development communication. In a critical review of this normative perspective, I will show below its inadequacy to address issues related to the role of the press in the democratic process. I will therefore go on to recommend and develop the theory of the public sphere as a pertinent normative theory against which one can judge the Kenyan political media and make recommendations for their improvement.
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Please note that this thesis is read-only and is not to be duplicated in anyway. |
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