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Gendered Media and Political Communication in Africa: The Kenyan Experience
Abstract
The African media landscape has grown tremendously in the last 20 years and currently, communication channels are more accessible to various groups, even those previously marginalised in the society. Access to communication channels is important as the media sets the agenda and guides everyday discourses and interactions. However, of concern to this paper is the analysis of the African media landscape that is highly gendered; whereby media owners and practitioners are predominantly male. As a result, the message design and communication favours male over female political candidates because a lot of propaganda and persuasion is often used to entice the electorate. The chapter discusses how political images seen on television are often centered on the male dominant figure in politics, while the women are often discussed from the periphery. Due to a mainly male dominated political scene, women shy away from participating and those who chose to get involved, often have to fight against societal stereotypes enabled by the media which inovertly propagates the notion that competitive politics is a manly affair. In many African countries therefore female stereotyping is prevalent in the media during electioneering period. An analysis of news coverage shows that among the news stories reported by male journalists on television, 76 per cent were often men subjects while only 29 percent of stories reported by female journalists were about women in politics. Even when women featured in the stories in the centre pages and at the end of news bulletins, they were about them as victims of political violence during campaigns rather than males/females participating in campaigns as future leaders and decision makers.
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