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Government media's handling of important issues
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Weekly Media Update 2005-27
Monday July 18^th – Sunday July 24^th 2005

THE government media’s distorted and partisan handling of important issues of public interest was starkly illustrated by The Herald’s attempt this week (21/7) to conceal the political affiliation of two men who murdered another individual in Masvingo in January 2002 over what the paper vaguely described as "political differences".

In an evidently abbreviated story buried on page 5, the paper reported that High Court Judge Justice Samuel Kudya had sentenced both men to 25 years in jail for the murder of Atmos Makomere. The paper suffocated any news of what these differences might have been, giving the impression that the court had not been told. Instead, it focused on the decision by the judge to uphold the defence counsel’s submission that "the political environment prevailing at the time of the murder was an extenuating factor", which had spared Makomere’s murderers from the gallows. The Herald didn’t even remind its readers of the significant fact that "the political environment prevailing at the time…" was the violence-scarred presidential election campaign of 2002.

Details of the murder – and the extent of The Herald’s distortion by omission – only emerged after The Standard (24/7) published its report of the trial. The private weekly’s story revealed that the court had actually been given a graphic account of how the killers, both ZANU PF activists, together with other ruling party supporters, had beaten Makomere, an MDC supporter, to death and buried him in a shallow grave.

The Standard also reported that Justice Kudya had castigated the police for a "shoddy job" which manifested itself in their failure to bring to justice other culprits involved in the murder. According to the paper, he "instructed" the police to investigate the case further and arrest those who had also "played a part in the murder".

The Herald deliberately censored all these highly relevant facts from its trial report. This crude and blatant distortion of judicial proceedings is clearly an act of "journalistic sabotage" and warrants official censure – let alone the attentions of the Media and Information Commission.

In another development during the week the police raid on ZimRights offices in the middle of the night on July 19 escaped the attention of all the media. According to ZimRights, three policemen ordered a security guard to allow them onto the premises and then threatened an individual working late to allow them into the offices where they spent the remainder of the night. They left in the morning, but other policemen returned during the day on July 21st and demanded to know whether National Constitutional Assembly Chairman Lovemore Madhuku had visited the organisation. This is the second raid on the human rights watchdog this year and appears to be an attempt to intimidate its staff.

It is important that the media reports such issues to expose the unwarranted intrusions and violations of Zimbabweans’ constitutionally guaranteed rights to privacy by security agents, who, ironically, should be safeguarding those rights in the first place.

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