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International
Relations
Media Monitoring
Project of Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Extracted from Weekly Media Update 2005-06
Monday February 7th - Sunday February 13th 2005
THE government
media also demonstrated their worthlessness as reliable sources
of information by deliberately suffocating the region's growing
concerns about the political situation in the country ahead of general
elections. They achieved this mainly through censorship - as illustrated
by their blackout on the adoption by the African Union of a report
criticizing government's poor human rights record - or the use of
conspiracies to dilute the legitimacy of the criticism leveled against
government by civic and political leaders in the region.
All 12 of the
stories the official media carried on the matter were dismissive
of such regional censure, claiming it was part of a Western conspiracy
to tarnish the image of the country. An example was the passive
manner in which The Herald (8/2) allowed ZANU PF secretary for Administration
Didymus Mutasa to attack Archbishop Desmond Tutu, describing him
as a "vassal of imperialism". ZTV (9/2, 8pm) ran a similar story.
Both stories were, however, reported in the form of an official
response without providing the exact background to what the Archbishop
had allegedly said. Otherwise, only the private media managed to
keep their audiences fully abreast of the unfolding events through
timely updates and analyses in the
24 stories they
carried on these issues. Their voice distribution was also generally
balanced as shown in Fig 3.
Fig 4 Voice
distribution in the private newspapers
| Voice |
Number
of voices |
| Foreign
diplomats |
16
|
| ZANU
PF |
0
|
| MDC
|
3
|
| Government
|
5
|
| Other
opposition parties |
2
|
| Editorial/reporter
|
3
|
| Alternative
|
4
|
| Total
|
33
|
Notably, the
private media were not in agreement on the sincerity of the region's
criticism of government or of its fact-finding missions. The Sunday
Mirror (13/12) carried five stories querying the motive of such
missions, particularly the one by COSATU.
But there was
no such diversity of opinion within the government media, which
only relied on sources sympathetic to the authorities in their coverage
of the matter.
For instance,
besides the nine government voices cited in these media, most of
the five alternative voices and all the three editorials they carried
defended government's policies.
In addition,
the seven foreign voices these media featured in their stories were
merely quoted in retrospect and in the context of justifying government's
dismissal of their claims.
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