School of Journalism, Media and Communication

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11951/249

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Browsing School of Journalism, Media and Communication by Author "Semujju, Brian"

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    Climate change in Ugandan media: A ‘Global Warming’ of journalism ethics
    (Journal of African Media Studies, 2013) Semujju, Brian
    The idea of climate change has reached a contentious breaking point at an interna¬tional level where its major causes, existence and intensity are separating informed minds. This article is an examination of the four major schools of thought on climate change and how two newspapers in Uganda are covering those divergent views. The article argues that in the coverage of global warming in particular the hith-erto treasured notion of objectivity has been replaced by a form of blind journalism instigated by frames from local and international stakeholders. The study analyses content from two newspapers in Uganda to show that media in Uganda cover the resonating frame, which argues that climate change is a time bomb, with total disre¬gard for other views or their existence. Guided by the framing theory, the article suggests that a detachment of climate change from international meanings and an introduction of the ‘scientific spirit’ will restore balance by inviting media to explore counter-frames.
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    Community Audio Towers in Uganda
    (3CMedia, 2016-05) Semujju, Brian
    While community broadcasting has been documented for aiding development in the Global South, communities in Uganda engage in narrowcasting and share information using Community Audio Towers (CATs). This challenges our understanding of communication for development media since CATs employ both the one-way and the two-way approaches to ensure survival. Among the crucial areas of CATs that have not been attended to by academic scrutiny is the issue of how CATs sustain themselves financially. To cover that gap, the CAT processes of information gathering, processing and dissemination, are discussed below. The discussion comes from data collected using 10 key informant interviews to show how CATs, platforms that are economically non-viable, are able to survive in myriad economically-oriented media systems in Uganda. Implications of CATs for local community development are herein highlighted.
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    Frontline Farmers, Backline Sources: Women as a tertiary voice in climate change coverage
    (Routledge (Taylor and Francis), 2015) Semujju, Brian
    Gender meaning construction and interpretation, which suggest women’s inferiority to men, is deeply rooted in social-cultural signs and codes drawn from traditional contexts. In Uganda, girls start to face this reality at an early age. Among low income earning families, very few are enrolled in school, thus as they grow up they suffer from invisibility created by low education and income levels. This paper notes how such gender realities in the media have been investigated in other parts of the world and that the general thesis has been that the media have “marginalized women in the public sphere.” Turning to the position of women as both sources and reporters, in Uganda this area of inquiry has been given little scholarly attention. To fill that gap, this essay draws upon feminist media theory to help contextualize findings obtained through content analysis (N=671) data drawn from two Ugandan newspapers. Using climate change as a coverage issue, since 56percent of women in Uganda are farmers, the results of this study show that the gender gap in Uganda is highly pronounced, with women as sources ranked third in importance after men and anonymous sources.
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    Introducing Community Audio Towers as an alternative to community radio in Uganda
    (Journal of Alternative and Community Media, 2016) Semujju, Brian
    Community radio started as an alternative to commercial media. The need for an alternative was clear, with many societal voices unrepresented, indicating the domination of the means of mental production by a few. This article presents two communities in Uganda that use Community Audio Towers (CATs) as an alternative to community radio, and examines why the communities prefer the use of CATs to ‘mainstream’ community radio. Using data collected through observation at two sites in Uganda and 10 key informant interviews from major communication stakeholders, including Uganda’s Minister of Information and Communication Technology, the article presents findings indicating that CATs are self-sustaining, with no NGO influence, and they redefine news to mean local emergencies and occurrences, while having no structures (horizontal/vertical rhetoric) as they are started and run by one community member. The challenges of the new alternative media are also discussed.
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    Participatory media for a non-participating community: Western media for Southern communities
    (Sage publications, 2014) Semujju, Brian
    This paper draws on the contrast between community media and the nature of its communities in Africa that are not participatory but use participatory media. The general contention is that participatory media in Africa preside over non-participatory communities. The paper uses data collected at one Ugandan community media to prove that the limitations between community media and ‘the community’ require over half a century to solve. The immediate solution should be to rethink the idea of community, pay more attention not just to the nature of which media can develop which community as if it (community) was a homogeneous entity but also the idea of which community has the ability to host which media. The paper concludes by suggesting a redefinition of media to include non-media forms that show more potential in enhancing participation for all than community media.
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    The structure of news in Community Audio Towers
    (Journal of African Media Studies, 2017) Semujju, Brian
    This article draws attention to the current sensational modernist conceptualization of news as conflict and prominence to argue that news among the poor be understood as activities happening in a village. Findings obtained through observation at two Community Audio Towers (CATs), plus ten key informant interviews with Uganda’s CAT stakeholders at community and national levels, suggest that the global media logic, supported by massive media structures that dictate what news is, finds no relevance in critical local news methodologies. Using the Critical theory, this article concludes that the counter-ideological events redefine the concept of news from conflict and prominence obtained through professional news making cultures to whatever information the village members take to the towers.