Peasant demonstrators, violent invaders: representations of land in the Zimbabwean press

The tense political environment of the late 1990s, in which the Zimbabwean government was confronted with a more vocal civil society and a new political party, set the stage for the introduction of a new private newspaper The Daily News. For the first time a serious challenge was posed to the long-standing monopoly of the government-controlled daily newspaper The Herald. This article compares and analyzes how these two daily newspapers have represented the land reform program and the land occupations in Zimbabwe which gained momentum in early 2000. It argues that media representations of the land question in the run-up to the June 2000 parliamentary elections came to parallel the polarized political environment, thereby missing chances for a serious and more subtle debate on the land issue in the Zimbabwean media.