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Direct access to the media in election campaign
A review & recommendations for Zimbabwe
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe
November 30, 2001

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Direct access coverage in Zimbabwe – recent experiences

Zimbabwean electoral law says nothing about direct access coverage of parties and candidates in the media, so it is not surprising that the actual practice has varied considerably from election to election.

Before the 1995 parliamentary elections, the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation set up an Election Coverage Committee (ECC). One explanation that has been given for this development is that in the previous parliamentary election, in 1990, the ruling party went too far in breaching good taste and fair coverage in television advertisements that compared the main opposition party to car crashes and AIDS. Since the ZBC had a broadcasting monopoly, the ECC effectively had power to control all broadcast coverage of the election. The ECC decided that political parties fielding candidates in at least 15 constituencies would receive 30 minutes of free airtime on ZBC TV, and Radios 1, 2 and 4. Parties with fewer candidates would receive five minutes on each channel.

For the 2000 constitutional referendum no such ground rules were set down. In practice the ZBC chose to run advertising material on behalf of (and under the editorial control of) one of the contending campaigns – the Yes campaign – but not on behalf of the No campaign. The National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) challenged this in the High Court and won a ruling in its favour on 14 January 2000. The ZBC refused to comply with the ruling (and indeed its news programmes failed even to report the court’s decision). Eventually ZBC did broadcast some, but not all, of the NCA’s material. The grounds it gave was that it was "unbalanced". In a statement on 28 January 2000, the corporation stated that it was legally barred from showing "pornographic material", the implication being that some NCA material fell into this category. This was never clarified.

One characteristic of the direct access material broadcast by ZBC for the referendum was a serious blurring between editorial and advertising – in other words, there was no clarity on what was under the control of the "Vote Yes" campaign and what was the ZBC’s own material. Short advertisements (broadcast invariably in prominent slots) were clearly Constitutional Commission "Vote Yes" campaign material. Yet there were also six 55-minute television "documentaries" produced by a private production company on behalf of the Constitutional Commission. These were presented (as were the later NCA "documentaries") by prominent ZBC personalities.

According to MMPZ’s calculations at the time, during the six-week period before the referendum, ZBC television alone broadcast Constitutional Commission material at a cost of Z$10 million according to its own advertising rates. MMPZ appealed to the Constitutional Commission to publish the accounts of its campaign in order to determine whether this money had in fact been paid to secure air time. This information has not yet been made public.

Shortly after the referendum, the ZBC published an advertisement in The Herald inviting political parties to submit advertising material for broadcast during the forthcoming parliamentary election campaign. In practice, however, ZBC did not run political advertisements throughout most of the campaign. Direct access coverage rather consisted of a 15-minute television slot for each party, divided into three five-minute English, Shona and Ndebele segments. There was no direct access slot on the radio, which is the main source of news and political information for most Zimbabweans. The Election 2000 television programme also provided each party with a 25-minute slot towards the end of the campaign to present their views. Once again a similar slot was not available on radio.

However, although there was equality of a sort in the ZBC’s direct access coverage – or lack of it – the reality was that the corporation’s news coverage was massively skewed in favour of ZANU-PF. On 13 June 2000, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) succeeded in securing a ruling from the Supreme Court, ordering that the ZBC fulfil its obligation to carry broadcasting services impartially, without discrimination on the basis of political opinion and without hindering persons in their right to impart and receive ideas and information. This ruling appears to have been entirely ignored by the ZBC which, on the eve of the election, ran two ZANU-PF advertisements, the only ones of the entire election campaign.

This brief account shows that there has been no consistent practice in Zimbabwe for organizing direct access coverage. This has been a problem, in that it has allowed the broadcasters to constantly shift the rules in order to deny full access to opposition parties. But it is also an opportunity, in that there have been positive judicial rulings on the issue and – in principle at least – the way is still open for a fair system to be put in place.

But what would be a fair system? This is the question that the remainder of this paper tries to address, as will the discussions at the workshop.

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