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Monetary policy review
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Extracted from Weekly Media Update 2005-04
Monday January 24^th – Sunday January 30^th 2005

RBZ Governor Gideon Gono’s 4^th quarterly monetary policy review attracted considerable attention from the official media and the private Press but received scant coverage from private radio stations.

Although the government media devoted 49 stories to the development and the private Press 32, SW Radio Africa only accorded it a single story while Studio 7 surprisingly ignored the event altogether.

But the publicity given to the event by the government media, and to a lesser extent The Financial Gazette and the Mirror stable, did not translate into a critical, informative reconciliation of the paradox of Gono’s optimism of a recovering economy to the apparent general economic distress on the ground.

For example, while the government media reported the governor claiming success in slashing inflation, it did not correlate this with the galloping cost of living or the likely inflationary pressure the $10 trillion facility he set up to bail out parastatals and local authorities would have on the economy.

Rather, these media simplistically and inequitably praised Gono’s monetary roadmap, with ZTV running repeats of the occasion and suspending usual programming to accommodate live broadcasts of subsequent breakfast discussions of the policy review.

In fact, out of the three hours and 55 minutes allocated to ZTV’s main news bulletins (excluding sport, weather and the arts) in the week, 45 minutes (or 19%) was devoted to the monetary policy review.

Although ZTV interviewed a large chunk of alternative voices as illustrated in Fig 4, they were all supportive of Gono’s monetary measures. So were all the 21 sources the government newspapers cited.

Fig. 4 Voice distribution in the electronic media

Interesting too, was the fact that while ZTV and Radio Zimbabwe (27/1, 8pm) quoted economist Eric Bloch, among other commentators, applauding the RBZ’s "great strides to stop the rot" affecting parastatals and the agricultural sector, SW Radio Africa of the same day quoted him criticising the governor’s export sector incentives as inconsequential.

The official media found unlikely allies in the form of the Financial Gazette and the Mirror, which carried a combined total of seven stories passively endorsing Gono’s monetary plans out of the 17 reports they published on the matter. The rest were just extracts of the governor’s statements.

The only deviation came from the Zimbabwe Independent and The Standard, which adopted a more critical approach to the matter in nine of their 15 stories. The remainder were extracts of Gono’s presentation.

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