Political crises can (re)configure relations between the media, political institutions, actors, and processes, sometimes in unpredictable ways. By focusing on how two leading Zimbabwean daily newspapers, The Herald and NewsDay framed the controversial entrance of President Robert Mugabe's wife Grace Mugabe into active politics, the chapter assesses media - politics relations during a political crisis. The chapter uses argumentation and rhetoric analysis to analyse the stories published by the two publications in October 2014, as this was Grace Mugabe's most politically active period. It argues that during a political crisis, the media become political players that wittingly/unwittingly persuade citizens using argumentation and rhetoric to support certain political positions with real consequences in the political sphere.

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Even though corruption by politicians and in politics is widespread worldwide, it is more pronounced in developing countries, such as Zimbabwe, where members of the political elite overtly abuse power for personal accumulation of wealth. Ideally, the news media, as watchdogs, are expected to investigate and report such abuses of power. However, previous studies in Zimbabwe highlight the news media’s polarised and normative inefficacies. Informed by the theoretical notion of deliberative democracy developed via Habermas and Dahlgren’s work and Hall’s Encoding, Decoding Model, this article uses qualitative content analysis to examine how online readers of Zimbabwe’s two leading daily publications, The Herald and NewsDay, interpreted and evaluated allegations of corruption leveled against ministers and deputy ministers during the height of factionalism in the ruling party (ZANU PF). The article argues that interaction between mainstream media and their audiences online shows the latter’s resourcefulness and, at least, discursive agency in their engagement with narratives about political corruption, itself an imperative premise for future political action.

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