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Acquittal
of Daily News journalists
Media
Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Weekly Media Update 2005-40
Monday October 10th – Sunday October 16th
2005
THE media’s
failure to inform the public of important developments has again
been exposed by their “no-memory” coverage of news; in
this case their failure to follow up on the trial of 44 journalists
from the banned Daily News accused of practicing without licences,
an offence that attracts a maximum jail sentence of two years under
Zimbabwe’s repressive media laws.
As this report
was being compiled, the international journalists’ watchdog
organisation, Reporters Sans Frontiers, revealed (25/10) that the
State had apparently “abandoned the prosecution”
of the journalists after court officials failed to turn
up for their trial on October 12th.
According to
the international journalists’ watchdog, the Daily News staffers
and their lawyer went to the court “but none of the court
officials including the judge in charge of the case knew about the
hearing”. It quoted an official from the paper’s
publishers, the Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe, saying the authorities
were “too embarrassed to proceed with the prosecution”
after the acquittal of the first Daily News journalist to be tried
on the same charge, Kelvin Jakachira, and had therefore decided
to “let the case slowly die a natural death”.
SW Radio Africa
(26/10) picked up the story the following day while the rest of
the media missed it. The fact that only the niche market radio station
reported the matter clearly shows the adverse effects of repressive
media laws, which have severely eroded media diversity, leaving
the partisan government controlled media the dominant sources of
information.
Instead of heeding
calls to democratise the country’s media environment, The Zimbabwean
(21/10) revealed that the authorities were instead employing unorthodox
means to further choke the free flow of information. The London-based
weekly reported an unnamed “intelligence source”
alleging that government was “using sophisticated
satellite equipment purchased from China” to jam broadcasts
by the small independent radio station, Voice of the People. MMPZ’s
own efforts to monitor the station’s signal over the past three
weeks have been frustrated by a steady droning interference.
SW Radio Africa,
which was forced to change its broadcasting frequencies in the run-up
to the March parliamentary election due to jamming, first reported
the issue about two months ago. MMPZ condemns these attempts to
starve the nation of alternative sources of information as desperate
acts of people frightened of the truth.
Visit the MMPZ
fact sheet
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