Knowledge, Attitude and Practice on Infant and Young Child Feeding: A Comparative Study of Radio Listening Club Members and Non-Members of Mudzi Wathu Community Radio in Mchinji District, Malawi

The current case-control study was conducted in Mchinji district in order to evaluate current infant and young child nutrition knowledge, attitudes, and practice (KAP) of radio listeners club (RLC) members and non-RLC members and also to determine if the frequency of listening to Mudzi Wathu Community Radio is directly related to improved knowledge, attitudes and perceptions(KAP) of RLC members. Further, the study examined whether or not community radio listeners club members were more knowledgeable in IYCF nutrition than non-RLC respondents with the purpose of assessing the effectiveness of disseminating nutrition information through mass media in general and through radio in particular and the benefits of having community radio listening clubs on improvement of KAP in communities.Key words: Attitude, Knowledge, Practice, Radio, Radio  Listening Club, community radio, Mudzi Wath

Mediating an alternative public sphere: Malawian readers attitudes and perceptions towards a tabloid

In December 2013, the Weekend Times, a weekly tabloid newspaper owned by the Blantyre Newspapers Ltd ceased publication. The Weekend Times was Malawi’s first and only tabloid. In its two years of existence, the newspaper enjoyed a faithful following among youthful urban dwelling readers. The paper attempts to understand why these readers enjoyed reading the Weekend Times and the effect the newspaper had in the communicative spaces occupied by the youth. The study uses Habermas’s public sphere theory to examine how the newspaper mediated discussion in the youthful public sphere. Using qualitative data drawn from 98 essays written by university students exploring their perceptions and attitudes towards the Weekend Times, the study employed thematic analysis as a mode of arriving at themes which form the bedrock of the findings. Three main themes are presented here: the mediation role played by the Weekend Times in the youthful alternative public sphere, the sharing of stories among the readers and the ambivalent feelings among the readers arising out of the newspaper’s sexualized content. The paper concludes by noting how the Weekend Times’s major contribution to Malawian journalism and the public sphere was its mediation of an alternative public sphere different from the politicized mainstream press

Framing Political Communication in an African Context: A Comparative Analysis of Post-Election Newspaper Editorials and Parliamentary Speeches in Malawi

The study compares and examines parliamentary rhetoric against newspapers editorials in Malawi to establish whether or not there are parallels in the way political issues are presented in both arenas. The study intends to establish whether or not newspapers in Malawi provide critical and analytical voices for newspaper readers or whether or not they simply reflect the political positions of their owners’ political parties by reflecting those political parties’ rhetoric in parliament. The study uses three case studies. Specifically, these are the one hundred days following 1994, 1999 and 2004 elections. Newly elected governments tend to use the early days of their election into office to articulate and lay the foundations of implementing their policies. The study uses frame theory analysis as a theoretical and analytical tool. The four main components of a frame: Problem Definition, Causal Interpretation, Moral Evaluation and Treatment Recommendation are used to detect frames in the corpora. Data were coded in accordance with the grounded theory method. Findings indicate that in 1994 and 1999, newspaper editorial writers framed political issues by reflecting the positions of their owners. However, in the 2004 case study, while the newspapers’ framing of political issues did not differ from parliamentary framing, changes in ownership and owners’ political re-alignment affected framing. The newspapers no longer reflected the position of the political parties, there was no division along political party-lines, and they did not take cues from parliament The study contributes to the study of political communication in Malawi by studying frames emerging from editorial and parliamentary discourse. Further, it contributes to a further understanding of linkages between issue-specific frames and generic frames in the African context