ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on media silences to assess any structural changes in the media as a barometer for a broader social transformation programme in the country. It discusses the potential of the new political dispensation charting trajectories for news production in Zimbabwe. The chapter highlights the apparent inevitability of elite-centrism across time and circumstance in a news logic at the core of professional journalism in Zimbabwean press. The culture of brutal suppression of voices of dissent and forms of popular mobilisation of resistance against oppression has a long tradition that has been wired into the national psyche since the suppression of the 1896–1897 revolt against colonial occupation. Some critics of the displacement of Mugabe by his former close aide Emmerson Mnangagwa at the helm of both the governing party and the state have expressed deep reservations and scepticism about the new dispensation’s commitment to bringing about meaningful social transformation.
