Browsing by Author "Semujju, Brian"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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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article argues that in the coverage of global warming in particular the hith-erto treasured notion of objectivity has been replaced by a form of blind journalism instigated by frames from local and international stakeholders.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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    Community Media Narrowcasting In Uganda: An Assessment of Community Audio Towers
    (University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2016) Semujju, Brian
    This thesis is about Community Audio Towers (CATs). CATs are small media platforms that use horn speakers hoisted on a long dry pole, an amplifier and a microphone to communicate daily village events. This study shows that individuals depend more on CATs than other available mainstream channels. The thesis interrogates the level of individual (i.e. villager) dependency on CATs in Ugandan rural and semi-urban communities alongside the other three available platforms in Uganda: radio, television and newspapers. There is a gap in existing literature to explain dependencies in small (alternative) media like CATs. Therefore, the study uses the Media System Dependency (MSD) theory (Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur, 1976), a relevant media theory that explains dependencies on a communication platform similar to this case study. However, since CATs are a community media, they are also theorised in this study within the framework of development communication, which helps the study to argue that CATs are small media platforms that provide local information. However, due to the need to investigate dependencies in CATs, the study‘s main research questions are raised using the MSD theory. The study employs both quantitative and qualitative methods. To investigate the level of individual dependency on CATs, a survey was done among 100 respondents from two districts in Uganda (50 respondents from each district). Data was collected in the rural Masaka district and in the semi-urban Mukono district. Additionally, to understand how CATs are sustained, how they attract the community members, and their position in the national communication infrastructure, ten key informant interviews were conducted with various CATs stakeholders like: the State Minister for ICT, technical experts at Uganda Communications Commission, District information and Development officers, local council chairmen and CATs announcers. The study found that the level of individual dependency on CATs is higher than the individual dependency on any other mass communication platform accessed by the sample communities. CATs appear to attract the audience through localising the processes of information gathering, processing and dissemination. These processes are affordable and done by the locals themselves, something that increases attention whenever the community requires a channel to communicate an issue. The challenges include noise, lack of a licence or regulation, and weather variations that disturb sound waves. The thesis concludes by introducing Small Media System Dependency (SMSD) relations to explain dependency relations in small/alternative media platforms.
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    Feminist power and its implications on Uganda’s malaria communication campaign
    (Feminist Media Studies, 2018) Nakiwala, Aisha Sembatya; Semujju, Brian
    This paper examines power and its manifestation in Uganda’s “Stop Malaria Campaign.” It specifically questions the apparent radical feminism, which is conceptualized as a quest for power, and how such excesses drive implementation of the campaign. The paper explains data collected through focus group discussions and key informant interviews using feminist communication theory as informed by the critical ideas of feminism and power. These three ideas help to put into perspective: domination of the campaign by one gender, interpretation of the campaign’s objectives to suit that one gender, and communication methods used in the campaign. Analysis of the above three processes shows that men are the weaker gender in the malaria prevention drive, an idea that has clashed with the existing male chauvinism on which several families still thrive in Africa. A view that radical feminism should be seen as an organized form of power that needs to be checked if Uganda’s malaria communication campaign is to be implemented successfully is herein proposed, along with some solutions to the challenges.
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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.