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Govt controlled media distorts coverage of police crackdown on labour protests and other news
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe
Extracted from Weekly Media Update 2003-40
Monday October 6th - Sunday October 12th 2003

The government controlled media's monopoly of daily news output since the banning of The Daily News was again highlighted this week by the superficial and distorted nature of its coverage of the police crackdown on labour protests and the illegal detention of the South African High Commissioner to Zimbabwe by new farmers.

Zimbabweans no longer have any mass circulating daily alternative source of information and therefore cannot so easily assess the truth of events as reported in the government media.

But it needs no comparison to state that the accounts of both incidents in The Herald and on ZBC reflected only official opinion and reported vaguely on the two events. For example, the two media organizations played down the demonstrations by the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, echoing police opinion that it was a "non-event", virtually ignoring its nationwide nature and the brutality of the police. There was no accurate figure given to the number of arrests and no effort was made to obtain comment from the ZCTU. Needless to say, the subsequent threat to blockade Zimbabwe by the South African trade union movement if the arrested union leaders were not released was completely ignored. Such were the omissions and evasions by the government media that their coverage of the demos cannot be described as a journalistic exercise and gravely misinformed their audiences. Only those with the privilege to access the private and international media (particularly SW Radio Africa and Studio 7) were able to obtain accounts closer to reality.

The public remained equally uninformed about the circumstances surrounding the detention of the South African High Commissioner, Jeremiah Ndou, by resettled farmers at a farm in Mashonaland West. The government-controlled media gave thin information on the issue and even tried to justify this lawless behaviour, which has characterised the land reform programme since farm invasions began three years ago.

In fact, ZBC distracted the attention of its audiences from such issues by bombarding them with excessive coverage of the Zimbabwe national soccer team's preparations for their 2006 World Cup preliminary qualifying match against soccer lightweights Mauritania. For example, the government-controlled ZTV devoted about 52 minutes to soccer, or 40 percent of the total airtime allocated to 8pm bulletins (excluding arts, business, weather and, notably, sport segments) aired from October 7th to the 12th. The trend was similar on Radio Zimbabwe which carried 40 soccer related news items or 34 percent of the total number of news items monitored in the same period.

Such manipulation of a popular sport at the expense of other important news constitutes an abuse of the public broadcaster's mandate and violates the public's right to be informed. This sort of news coverage highlights the need for alternative sources of information and demonstrates how far Zimbabwe is from being a democratic society.

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