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  Society plays a vital role in guiding human behaviours; as a result, the public needs to adhere to societal rules. This then gives primal importance to institutions, especially mass media, which communicate to the public. The accuracy of the institutions' information influences how well the public adheres to societal rules. This paper uses COVID-19 as a case study to investigate how mass media influences society's compliance with societal rules. This paper aims to examine both the positive and negative impacts of the media during COVID-19 and massages out how the media bring about social change through their influence on human behaviour. This paper is guided by strategic communication theory. The paper concludes that moving forward, the ethics of mass media is the best approach as it would go a long way to ensure that the industry's standards are high. Keywords: COVID-19, Mass media, Strategic Language, Communication, Ethics

Using critical discourse analysis (CDA) as the methodology and decolonial theory as the theoretical framework, this study sought to critique coverage of the Covid-19 crisis in Zimbabwe between March 2020 and July 2021 in Kwayedza newspaper’s editorial comment. Twelve articles written in an African language were purposively selected to obtain a sizable sample. This study found that the newspaper effectively covered Covid-19 in an African language while focusing on its socio-economic and cultural impact on the country and offered precautions and prescriptions for dealing with the pandemic. Its major downside was that it downplayed certain key issues in the process due to its ownership by Zimpapers, which tends to support the government’s policies. This violates ethical journalism principles such as independence, truth and accuracy and is an abrogation of the media’s duty to bring accountability to public officials. This paper, therefore, recommends adherence to the values of journalism which centralize public interest over that of owners.