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2021 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Dilemmas in Zimbabwe’s Public Broadcasting in the Era of Digitisation

Authors : Trust Matsilele, Golden Maunganidze, Pedzisai Ruhanya

Published in: Television in Africa in the Digital Age

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Broadcasting has faced rapid changes in the past decade following the advent and wide use of digital tools and with it digitisation. These changes have affected the mainstream media production practices and facilitated the emergence of new media players and introduced new consumption and interactive cultures as more transmission spaces and platforms have opened. This chapter, with a gaze on Zimbabwe, examines how the southern African nation has embraced this technological evolution by looking at its sole flagship broadcaster, the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation Television (ZBC-TV). This study is one of the seminal works on digitisation in Zimbabwe making empirical findings crucial to both policy makers, broadcast houses and future scholarship on digitisation in the global south. Semi-structured interviews, Focus Group Discussions, document analysis and observations were employed as data collection tools. The chapter employs the public sphere theoretical framework due to its emphasis on participatory politics. The results of the study indicate that ZBC-TV is lagging, in part, due to discohesion with other implementing partners. A lack of funding is also affecting the acquisition of critical infrastructure. More so, content creators’ failure to access relevant supporting infrastructure or the absence of enough mechanisms to regulate the quality of content was observed to be another challenge.

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Title: Dilemmas in Zimbabwe’s Public Broadcasting in the Era of Digitisation
Authors: Trust Matsilele
Golden Maunganidze
Pedzisai Ruhanya
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Television in Africa in the Digital Age
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-68853-0

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-68854-7

Copyright Year: 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68854-7_13