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ZBH: Unreliable source of information
Media Monitoring Project of Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Extracted from Weekly Media Update 2005-05
Monday January 31^st – Sunday February 6^th 2005

ONCE again, Zimbabwe Broadcasting Holdings (ZBH) affirmed its status as an unreliable source of information when it suppressed the announcement by the MDC that it had finally decided to contest the election despite the country’s uneven electoral framework.

While SW Radio Africa and Studio 7 (3/2) duly reported the announcement, ZBH completely ignored the issue that same day.

It was only a day later that the broadcaster buried the news in ZTV (4/2)’s evening bulletins.

Even then the issue was treated as part of a general story about some opposition parties having "shown interest" to contest the polls. Although the MDC spokesman Paul Themba Nyathi was given 20 seconds on ZTV’s 8pm bulletin to express the position of his party, he was abruptly cut and his statements drowned in expressions of ZANU PF’s optimism about winning the election.

For instance, immediately after truncating Nyathi’s statements, the reporter then gratuitously claimed that the MDC’s decision had "scarcely ruffled the feathers of …ZANU PF which remains confident that it will win the election overwhelmingly".

ZANU PF commissar Elliot Manyika was also quoted predicting victory for his party saying it will "crush" and "thrash" the MDC "thoroughly".

Radio Zimbabwe ignored the report altogether in its main news bulletins. As a result, the majority of Zimbabweans, who rely on the station for news, would still be ignorant of the MDC’s decision.

But ZBH’s blatant dereliction of duty was not only confined to political matters. It also manifested itself in the manner in which the broadcaster handled the opening of the central bank’s Zimbabwe Allied Banking Group (ZABG), an amalgamation of three banks that collapsed in the aftermath of the authorities’ clean-up of the financial sector.

While the rest of the media revealed that two of the banks had taken the central bank to court over the merger, ZBH suffocated the issue and continued to report glowingly on the initiative.

For example, though ZTV (1/2, 8pm) mentioned that "controversy" surrounded the opening to the public of the banking group, it did not elaborate. Instead, it glossed over the problems ZABG faced, giving the impression that the merger illustrated the effectiveness of the authorities’ economic policies.

It is such censorship of news that buttresses calls for the authorities to repeal the repressive laws on broadcasting so as to facilitate the establishment of a properly independent national public broadcaster free of political editorial control that would accurately record realities in Zimbabwean society.

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