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Government media's misinformation campaign
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Weekly Media Update 2005-25
Monday July 4^th – Sunday July 10^th 2005

THE government media’s misinformation campaign reached new extremes this week. These media either distorted or censored stories that portrayed government in bad light, in an effort to minimize the massive humanitarian crisis triggered by government’s Operation Murambatsvina and muffle condemnation of the exercise.

While the private media reported UN special envoy Anna Tibaijuka’s reservations over Murambatsvina, the official media suffocated this news and only selected comments that portrayed her as appearing to legitimise the exercise. This saw the Chronicle and The Herald (8/7) misleading their readers by claiming that   the UN envoy had endorsed the government’s brutal purge of the urban poor when they reported her saying that “cleaning up” cities was part of the world body’s ambition.

Apart from distorting Tibaijuka’s comments to justify government’s action, these papers also either censored or dismissed out-of-hand criticism of the clampdown as fabrications of the West while portraying Africa as fully behind Murambatsvina.

For example, The Herald (8/7) sought to downplay the African Union (AU)’s concern over government’s blitz on Zimbabwe’s urban populations by implying that the visit by Bahame Tom Nyanduga, to assess the impact of Murambatsvina, was not sanctioned by the AU but its human rights commission, the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights (ACHPR). To substantiate its claims, the paper then quoted unnamed third party sources narrating how AU Commission chairperson Alpha Oumar Konare had expressed “regret” to Foreign Affairs Minister Simbarashe Mumbengegwi over the failure by ACHPR to follow “proper procedures” in dispatching Nyanduga. The “sources” added that Konare had “pleadingly” told Mumbengegwi that he “stood by Zimbabwe”. No comment was sought from Konare or the AU, whom the private and international media reported as being responsible for sending Nyanduga.

Instead, the paper tried to scandalise the ACHPR, by dishonestly claiming that last year the commission “unsuccessfully tried to smuggle a damning” human rights violations report on Zimbabwe, which the AU had rejected. It deliberately omitted the fact that the African Heads of State adopted the report at the AU summit in January this year after the Zimbabwe government had managed to obstruct its adoption by the AU for nearly a year.

The government media also used a false story distributed by the international news agency, Associated Press, to dismiss international criticism of Zimbabwe as a British plot when The Herald (9/7) refuted the AP report claiming that Russian President Vladimir Putin had described President Mugabe as a dictator. The paper quoted an unnamed diplomatic source saying that an unnamed Zimbabwean government official had exposed Andrew Lloyd, the head of the southern Africa Desk at the British Foreign Office as being responsible for inventing the allegation in a memo to British Prime Minister Tony Blair. But besides quoting a statement from the Associated Press acknowledging it had wrongly attributed Putin’s comments, as well as the Russian ambassador’s dismissal of the story, the paper made no attempt to substantiate its claims, or even to seek comment from the British.

While the government media continues to disregard professional journalistic standards, an offence under the country’s repressive media laws, the government-appointed Media and Information Commission, whose term of office expired last week, has remained deafeningly silent.

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