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Front-page
news stories
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Weekly Media Update 2006-45
Monday November
6th 2006 – Sunday November 12th 2006
THIS week MMPZ
monitored 70 front-page stories from the Press to assess their news
value. Of these, 50 appeared in the government-controlled papers
and the remaining 20 in the private Press.
Although the government-controlled
papers mirrored most of the week’s topical developments, their treatment
of the issues were generally lopsided as they largely peddled official
views at the expense of alternative opinion. This was apparent in
their coverage of the alleged Ziscosteel (Zisco) corruption, Sino-Africa
summit, hand-over of farm leases to selected resettled A2 farmers
and the importation of low-grade fertiliser.
None of these
issues were openly debated. For example, the Chinese-Africa Summit
was basically presented through the eyes of President Mugabe while
the Zisco scandal was premised on official denials of the alleged
pillaging of the state-owned enterprise.
Consequently,
there was no reconciliation of the official responses with the findings
of the corruption investigation done by the Finance Ministry’s National
Economic Conduct Inspectorate (NECI). For instance, The Herald
(9/11) passively allowed Zisco bosses to dismiss the graft allegations
either by accusing NECI of having allegedly "transformed
media speculation into a report" or blaming
an unnamed Midlands MDC MP for orchestrating the corruption claims
as part of an agenda to remove "the ZANU PF aligned
management" from the company.
The official papers’
uncritical approach remained unbroken in their coverage of farm
leases. The stories merely celebrated the development without establishing
the identities of the beneficiaries, the criteria used to select
them or how the leases "could be used as collateral
for borrowing from banks and other lenders" (The
Herald and Chronicle 10/11). Neither did the government papers
go beyond official explanations on the controversy surrounding the
importation of substandard fertiliser (The Sunday Mail 12/11).
Only when dealing with crime reports, court cases and human-interest
stories did the papers generally give more informative accounts.
However, not all
topical issues were captured in the government papers’ front pages.
For example, none of them gave prominence to the rise in inflation
from 1 023% in September to 1 070% in October. The Herald
(11/11) buried the story on page 11 while the Chronicle of the same
day placed it on page two. Worse still, the Chronicle actually drowned
the subject with Finance Deputy Minister David Chapfika’s forecasts
that the inflation rate would "tumble" to
"980 percent by the end of the year"
due to government’s economic turnaround strategies. Only the
Mirror stable carried the story on the front page, including announcing
an increase in the Total Consumption Poverty Line for five people,
from $134 649 in September to $175 974 in October (Daily Mirror
11/11). In addition, its (12/11) report on the importation
of the "fake" fertiliser was more researched
than that of the government Press.
In fact, except
for its passive coverage of the Africa-China Summit and farm leases,
the rest of the stories that the stable published on its front pages
were fairly presented. Among these were reports on a ruling by the
High Court barring government from granting NetOne monopoly over
foreign currency earnings accrued from international termination
rates and allegations of in-house fighting in both ZANU PF and the
MDC.
The in-depth coverage
of important issues was more apparent in the Zimbabwe Independent
(10/11) and The Standard (12/11). For example, rather than
restrict itself to official pronouncements on the goings-on at Zisco,
the Independent investigated the pillaging of the company by top
government officials. No other paper went that extra mile during
the week. Similarly, The Standard – just like the Sunday
Mirror – boldly reported on the furore in government over the
importation of poor quality fertiliser on their front pages as compared
to The Sunday Mail (12/11)’s timid, damage control headline
story: The fertilisergate that never was.
Two of the three
stories that The Financial Gazette (9/11) carried on its
front page though topical, were largely compromised by their sensationalised
headlines. For example, while the paper announced: MDC camps bury
hatchet, there was no evidence in the story supporting this, as
the spokesmen from both factions never specifically said this. The
basis of the papers’ claims only appeared to come from unnamed "insiders"
from the rival factions. The story, Mugabe to wield axe, was tailored
in the same fashion.
It quoted unnamed
ZANU PF ‘insiders’ claiming manoeuvres by the Solomon Mujuru faction
to whittle the composition of the ruling party’s supreme decision-making
body, in its determination to curtail the influence of its rival
camp, led by Emmerson Mnangagwa, as the succession battles continue.
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