Framing Mandela: An (Inter)National Comparative News Analysis of the Iconic Leader’s Death (original) (raw)
Related papers
New Media and Mass Communication, 2014
This study is a cross-national investigation in the use of frames in news coverage of an event which has international significance-the flashpoint of Nelson Mandela's illness and hospitalization in South Africa. The study is anchored on the framing theory as espoused by Erving Goffman (1974). While studies examining frames in news coverage have gained significant ground in literature, there is paucity of studies examining news frames of events with health-cum-political undertones and how differences in national communication policies may influence frames in media discourse on such issues. To meet this gap, this present study analyses the news report of the illness and hospitalization of Nelson Mandela in leading newspapers in Nigeria and Zimbabwe. The study will also examine if major differences in frame choice emerged in the coverage between the countries. Qualitative content analysis methods will be employed in analyzing the coverage in the year 2013. The reliability of the inter-coded data will be tested using the Holsti's index. The categories for measuring frames in the coverage are based on frames found in extant literatures. The expected contribution of this study would be an understanding of the congruence or disparity in the pattern of frames in the news coverage of similar events cross nationally. Understanding cross-national news discourse on the issue might be important for situating communication policy matters within health-cum-political contexts.
Nelson Mandela’s “Show Trials”: An Analysis of Press Coverage of Mandela’s Court Appearances
Critical Arts, 2020
The figure of Nelson Mandela looms large in twentieth-century history. Beloved by celebrities around the globe, critics have noted his unique charismareferred to as "Madiba magic"-and his ability to enchant audiences. Despite this, there have been few analyses of his construction as a celebrity politician, most likely because of celebrity's association with frivolity and lack of substancewhich sits poorly with our sense of Mandela. There have been particularly few examinations of his portrayal prior to imprisonment, when the seeds of the Mandela myth were sowed. This paper examines some of the early press coverage, focusing on Mandela's "performances" in court. The paper argues that Mandela, helped by others, had a canny ability to preempt reactions to his appearance, and worked hard to direct his own image for political purposes. In addition, while Winnie Mandela's role in raising awareness of her husband's fate is well known, the paper shows how, even at this early stage, Mandela's prominence and machismo depended on her feminine visibility. Mandela's famed speech from the dock also founded a new moral tradition of protest and set the stage for his resurrection as the symbol of the Anti-Apartheid Movement.
Journal of Literary Studies, 2017
het om hul gekonstrueerde diskoers oor Mandela se nalatenskap aan sport te projekteer-'n lens wat sy individuele bydrae beklemtoon het, eerder as kollektiewe pogings om die Wêreldbeker na Suid-Afrika en die Afrika-kontinent te bring. Die outeur beweer dat Mandela se nalatenskap aan sport onlosmaaklik deel is van sy groter erflating aan die politiek en die samelewing, wat daarop dui dat, sover dit postkoloniale gemeenskappe betref, hierdie twee terreine deurweef is.
Mandela and Beyond: Thinking New Possibility in the 21st Century
Routledge eBooks, 2020
To map my way, I'd like to begin with two recent cultural texts or events featuring the name and biography of South Africa's first democratic president. One is an exhibition, the other a poem. Both after their fashion approach Nelson Rohihlahla Mandela as a symbol that, though built on a twentieth century base, also bears reference to twenty-first-century culture and politics. The texts allow me to ask something I have asked before, in my short 2008 biography Nelson Mandela, but to angle that question to the decades that lie ahead. 1 The question probes the value of Mandela's career and life's work as an ongoing object lesson or theory-in-practice. How did his way of doing politics, his almost charmed facility of interacting evenhandedly with political enemies and friends alike, lay down a model for South Africa in the future? In particular, what might Mandela's story continue to teach us, further into the twenty-first century-especially when that story is re-evaluated, freshly interpreted and historically re-angled, as in this special issue? My first 'text' is the Nelson Mandela Official Exhibition that ran at the Leake Street Gallery in London from 8 February to 2 June 2019, and then travelled internationally. It was supported by the Robben Island Museum, the Mayibuye Archives at UWC, and others, including Zelda La Grange, Mandela's long-serving personal assistant, and members of the Mandela family. The exhibition sought to represent the life of the statesman through photographs and video clips, as well as a selection of his treasured objects, ranging from handwritten letters through to his watch. But it also had an interest in calling visitors to a sense of moral action by insistently reminding them of the values of justice, peace, reconciliation and humanity for which Mandela stood. 2 My second text is '1994: a love poem', a hard-hitting, witty lyric by the Cape Town poet-activist Koleka Putuma. In the 21-line poem, she calls for someone to love her adoringly, even abjectly, fawningly, 'the way that white people look at / and love / Mandela'. 3 She wants, she quips, 'a TRC kind of lover'. The poem threads together a series of loose couplets linking white 'love' for Mandela to 'betrayal', 'fuckery' and living in the past, culminating in an intentionally shocking charge-that white
'Mandela: The Historians view'
BBC History Magazine
Debate article in the BBC History Magazine about Nelson Mandela's life, legacy and impact between historians Matthew Graham, Saul Dubow, Keith Shear and David Killingray
A brief journalistic article examining attempts to use Mandela's image for political purposes, included a short analysis of his final TV appearance in South Africa, a few months before his death.
Mandela the zeitgeist, in antiquity, to posterity
I have often wondered why many find it difficult to conscientiously reflect about former President Nelson Mandela, not least now because of his demise. Some people consider it easy to engage in such reflections and in fact most “write what they like” about this international icon, often in ahistorical and depoliticised narratives. Paradoxically, I am also inclined to concur: it is not difficult to write and say anything about Madiba. What is difficult is writing what ought to be written, what ought to be said about what he really represents; if the milieu that shaped him, the context that shaped his decisions which, is truly appreciated by all those who invoke his name, the world we live in would undoubtedly be a better place today. Unfortunately, what most writers, commentators and politicians do is selectively draw and apply ‘lessons from Mandela’. Habitually, commentary is punctuated with posture that suggests those in power don’t qualify to be there because they are not a ‘Mandela’. In South Africa in particular, a debate is unfolding which unfairly gauges the performance and style of contemporary leaders in terms of the yardstick of the Mandela persona. The blemish in the comparison is two-fold.