Reconceptualizing Journalists as a Fractured Interpretive Community: Updating the Journalistic Interpretive Community Framework for the 21st Century

Abstract

Taking a discursive approach, this study applies the concept of metajournalistic discourse to the study of press freedom debates in a postcolonial context stretching from 1993 to 2023 between the Zimbabwean public and private press. Based on a textual analysis of press freedom debates, combined with interviews with various news media stakeholders held between December 2022 and January 2023 in Harare, the study finds support for the previous argument that the idea of journalistic interpretive communities does not really hold under contested contexts beyond liberal Western democracies. The study extends this idea by reconceptualizing journalistic communities beyond liberal Western democracies as fractured interpretive communities. The study further argues that rising polarization and epistemic contests under liberal Western democracies now threaten journalistic interpretive communities as previously understood. This is especially so for those journalists who operate under a contested and polarized news media and political environment, without a single dominant national ideology.