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NCA demo and human rights issues
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Weekly Media Update 2006-28
Monday July 10^th 2006- Sunday July 16^th 2006

THE media’s failure to inform their audiences of important events manifested itself again during the week after they failed to report on the heavy-handed way in which police broke up and arrested scores of activists from the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) demanding a new constitution.

Only niche market radio stations operating outside the country, such as Studio 7 and SW Radio Africa, or online publications domiciled on the Internet like New Zimbabwe.com alerted their audiences to this event.

The government media were worse. Not only did they censor the police clampdown on the NCA protest, they also blacked out all other rights violations that took place in the week involving state security agencies.

Instead, they diverted attention from these abuses by flooding their audiences with 39 follow-up stories focussing only on the arrests and subsequent court appearance of MDC activists accused of assaulting officials from the party’s rival faction led by Arthur Mutambara.

ZBH aired 15 of these while government papers published 24.

The government papers, especially, used the reports, most of which were given front-page status, to continue maligning the Tsvangirai-led MDC. They also used the episode to lash out at the West, gender activists and civic society for their alleged hypocrisy in dealing with political violence and rights violations, saying they had not unconditionally

condemned the MDC’s suspected violence.

For example, The Herald (13/7) carried three articles attacking the US and the West for duplicity after the Americans issued a statement arguing that the MDC’s alleged acts of violence only mirrored the "institutionalisation of violence" by the ruling party. The censure came from Deputy Information Minister Bright Matonga, the paper’s political editor, Caesar Zvayi, and controversial war veterans’ leader Joseph Chinotimba.

Zvayi, for instance, claimed the US would not categorically condemn Tsvangirai because he was "on their payroll", adding that "Uncle Sam is the biggest sponsor of violence and terrorism throughout the world" and it would therefore be "the height of optimism to expect them to condemn their source of livelihood".

However, as these media attempted to rally public sentiment against the MDC’s perceived violent nature, they found nothing ironic about President Mugabe’s address to his party’s Central Committee threatening dissenting voices.

ZTV (14/7,8pm), for example, just passively quoted him warning planned protests against his administration, saying: "Any sinister efforts designed to challenge the authority of government through any illegal way will meet with the full wrath of our law…"

ZBH’s poor handling of the topic was reflected by its narrow sourcing pattern as seen in Fig 1.

Fig. 1 Voice Distribution on ZBH

Notably, the MDC voices the State broadcaster sourced were those of the Mutambara-led faction, mainly accusing their counterparts of being violent.

Although the government papers’ sourcing pattern appeared balanced, their stories remained anti-Tsvangirai.

Fig. 2 Voice distribution in the government Press

Like the government media, the mainstream private papers appeared to find nothing wrong with the aggressive way in which the police put an end to the NCA demo. Except for The Standard (16/7), which merely captured the development in a caption to its front-page picture of NCA protestors, they remained uncharacteristically silent.

But the private electronic media maintained their alertness. They devoted at least six stories to the subject, highlighting how the police swooped on the nationwide NCA protest, arresting about 200 demonstrators.

In fact, two days after the protests Studio 7 (14/7) reported an NCA spokesman saying that 145 of their members were still in police custody "after the police failed to take them to court".

The private media carried five new incidents of rights violations, all reportedly perpetrated by the police against members of the public and the MDC. These cases included arrests and the banning of demonstrations and opposition meetings on the grounds that the police were merely enforcing POSA.

For example, The Financial Gazette (13/7) reported two MDC officials from Bulawayo and Matabeleland North as having been arrested "for allegedly organising or addressing unauthorised meetings…" while the Zimbabwe Independent (14/7) reported that police had banned the MDC from "holding rallies… fearing they might mobilise people into anti-government protests."

In another incident, the Independent reported Chinhoyi police as having barred an opposition rally on the grounds that "toilets at the venue were out of order".

The government media ignored these developments and so did the Mirror stable. All six stories the stable carried on the topic only focused on the alleged MDC violence.

Notable however, was the private media’s failure to seek official comments to balance and corroborate their rights abuse stories as reflected in Figs 3 and 4.

Fig 3: Voice Distribution in the private electronic media.

Fig 4: Voice distribution in the private Press

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