The threat and actual outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic was a newsworthy
issue in East Africa, as was the case around the world. Using content analysis,
the study examines how two newspapers framed the responses of political
actors to managing and stopping the pandemic in the publications’ respective
countries. Based on the framing theory, the study focused on the online versions
of two independent newspapers-The Citizen (Tanzania) and the Daily Monitor
(Uganda)-with the objective of understanding the embedded motive in the
response of the respective governments. The study focused on two hybrid
democracies that took restrictive (Uganda) and liberal (Tanzania) approaches
to combating the pandemic. It focused on the period starting the closure of
the first international airport in East Africa (March 2020) to the re-opening of
businesses in Uganda in July 2020. Results show that the lockdown, statistics,
prevention, management, and economy frames were the most dominant in both
Uganda and Tanzania as politicians in the hybrid regimes directly or indirectly
addressed minimizing losses in official speeches as the countries headed for
elections. Tanzania’s press generally was dominated by foreign news sources,
while Uganda’s press was dominated by official government sources. In
both countries, COVID-19 was treated as a foreign disease, and the political
environment acted as a frame within which newspaper operations were moved
to present the pandemic in the ways in which they did.
Submitted by ILukanda on 
