Extreme-Weather Disasters and Media Discourses in Malawi

This innovative volume provides a comprehensive critical analysis of global media discursive practices in constructing and representing social actors following extreme-weather disasters that caused massive destruction and loss of lives in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially in Malawi, South Africa and Mozambique.It contextualises the past five years' reports on the hydrometeorological disasters of tropical cyclones Freddy, Idai, Gombe, Baptista and Ana to investigate the discursive strategies that global (local and international) media typically used to present the selected content and what the overt and covert are that media texts put out to their respective implied audiences. Specifically, the book analyses the media construction and representation of the different social actors involved in the disasters, primarily focusing on varied ways that media foregrounded their situation while incisively examining gender inequalities and other stereotypical representations. The social actor construction is juxtaposed with the communicative power relations debates, the global hierarchies between the respective North-South communities, examining the specific interlocking humanitarian, hegemonic and expertise discourses from the purposively selected cases in the media. Informed by multimodal critical discourse analysis theories, the book contends that the media negatively represented the victims of the disasters and their respective local governments as underprepared, unresponsive and passive recipients of humanitarian aid. It also ascertains the generic portrayal of donor countries and non-profit organisations as compelling social actors with agency. The global media reports also uphold and perpetuate gender inequalities with minimal difference between the local and international news outlets. The book situates our understanding that the global media representation of extreme-weather disasters in Malawi is not neutral but socially constructed with various ideological perspectives.