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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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Who is responsible for making this allocation?
The absence of a credible, impartial and authoritative electoral supervisory body dogs any attempt to establish a fair direct access system – as it does all other aspects of electoral management in Zimbabwe.

MMPC Recommends

• Allocation of direct access time should be the responsibility of an independent electoral commission

Who will produce the direct access material? Who will pay for it?
We have referred up till now to "free" direct access material – but of course nothing is free. Direct access programmes or advertisements must be produced and this requires money and skills. One of the unanswered questions in the media campaign for the constitutional referendum was where the money came from to pay for the glossy Constitutional Commission advertisements and advertorial "documentaries".

Other countries have adopted a number of different variants:

• Political parties themselves produce material, or pay for its production, out of campaign funds.
• The public broadcaster produces all broadcast material, free of charge, in-house.
• The electoral authorities make a grant to the parties to produce the material.
• The electoral authorities pay the public broadcaster to make programmes for the parties.
• There is a hybrid arrangement where parties can make their own material if they wish, or have it provided free if they are unable to do this themselves.

Once again the main issues are twofold: to ensure the incumbent does not have an unfair advantage by using government-controlled resources and to make sure that new and poor parties are not disadvantaged.

In Mozambique in 1994, for example, a number of parties did not have the facilities to make their own election broadcasts and were unaware of the procedures for providing video cassettes to the broadcaster. The result was that their slots went out with a blank screen, or at most a caption urging viewers to vote for the party.

By contrast, in Poland the state-owned television company has provided facilities for the parties to produce their broadcasts according to strictly defined criteria. It has made available a studio for recording, or a camera team consisting of three technicians and a journalist. (The parties can decide not to have the journalist if they felt that his or her presence would compromise their own editorial control of the broadcast.) The role of the team is purely technical.

MMPC Recommends

• There should at least be an option for parties to have direct access broadcasts made free of charge by ZBC. All editorial control would rest with the parties and ZBC’s role would be purely technical.

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