Back to Index

Power of propaganda
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Extracted from Weekly Media Update 2004-33
Monday August 16th - Sunday August 22th 2004

During the week the results of an authoritative survey assessing the popularity of President Mugabe were released, revealing a dramatic increase in the public's trust in President Mugabe, rising from 20 percent in 1999 to 46 percent this year.

Three respected research organisations were involved in the "Afrobarometer" survey, which attributed this increase to the growing intensity of the propaganda pumped out by the government-controlled media and the strangling of the independent media in the country.

The Zimbabwe Independent (20/8) quoted the survey as saying: "In a setting where the mass media have been strangled and the diet of public information is tightly controlled, many Zimbabweans have apparently succumbed to Zanu PF's view of a country beset by internal and external enemies."

Certainly, government's concerted efforts to crush the independent media and its unrelenting grip on the public media to disseminate its messages have suffocated all but the last vestiges of public democratic discourse in the country. Predictably, these measures have resulted in the collapse in the number of alternative sources of information that can be accessed by the public, who are, in turn, narrowly "informed" by the limited sources of information available to them - the government controlled media.

This is the essence of propaganda and it is not surprising that the survey was entitled, The Power of Propaganda: Public Opinion on Zimbabwe.

However, The Sunday News' Mzala Joe (22/8) disputed this reasoning. Describing the Afrobarometer as "racist", the faceless columnist claimed that President Mugabe enjoyed public trust "because of his commitment and dedication to the people", adding that "the public media has merely reported what President Mugabe does . . . (and) does not lie".

He further claimed that the President's popularity was on the increase because the "public is sick and tired of the lies" in the "opposition Press" such as the Zimbabwe Independent, "which never says anything true or good about President Mugabe".

But a report by Zimbabwe Online (23/8) revealed the extent to which the government has hijacked the public media to raise its own profile by tarnishing that of the country's political opposition.

It reported that Information Minister Jonathan Moyo had ordered editors of the government controlled media to intensify their propaganda against the opposition MDC ahead of next year's general election.

The report quoted editors as having said Moyo criticised journalists from the official media for being lenient in their coverage of the MDC and instructed them to use their papers, television and radio stations to "bury the puppet MDC".

An unnamed journalist who attended the meeting was also quoted claiming: "The Minister said he did not want to see a story that gave the MDC any measure of legitimacy. He said our job should now be to write obituaries on the opposition".

Interestingly, the recently adopted SADC protocol on elections compels member states to give all political parties equal access to the public media as one of the prescribed conditions for holding free and fair elections.

Visit the MMPZ fact sheet

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP