ABSTRACT
This chapter is a review of extant scholarship about tabloids in Zimbabwe. The chapter details the economic, political, and cultural conditions in which Zimbabwean tabloids emerged, are consumed, and the cultural work they perform in the everyday lives of their readers. Specifically, the chapter adds to existing scholarship by suggesting that the moral-ethical turn in media studies might yield much needed insight into tabloid mediations of mundane and proximal suffering in the Global South. This would expand research on tabloid media to include the hitherto neglected question of “what people actually do when confronted with mediations of suffering” (Kyriakidou 2011, 13). Impetus for this research agenda derives from the recognition that “no other spectacle can raise the ethical question of what to do so compellingly as suffering” (Chouliaraki 2008, 832). Using the B-Metro’s mediation and reception of child abuse as a case study, the chapter illuminates how the mediated visibility of suffering is “performative … enacts paradigmatic forms of agency toward suffering” and “moralises audiences by habituation” (ibid.).
