Rethinking Gender Mainstreaming in the Media: Lessons from Zimbabwe Media Coverage of the First Six Months of the Government of National Unity

The media are very complex entities to deal with and like many other established and intricate social systems, they are closed, conservative and exclusive. Gender issues and gendered arguments do not normally find space in media texts and media practitioners have, for long, been taking this exclusion of gender issues as normal journalistic practice. Using the coverage of the allocation of cabinet posts in the Government of National Unity (GNU), this paper seeks to understand why, despite rovisions in the Global Political Agreement (GPA) to ensure gender parity in the allocation of key cabinet posts, the newspapers did not critique cabinet appointments on the basis of gender.