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Media’s
worrying dereliction of duty
Media
Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Weekly Media Update 2006-50
Monday December 11th 2006 – Sunday December 17th
2006
THE media's
worrying dereliction of duty was this week demonstrated by their
inadequate coverage of new findings linking the police to gross
rights violations in the country and government's gagging
of British journalists from producing a documentary exposing the
true nature of the Zimbabwe crisis.
For example,
none of the media gave due prominence to a Zimbabwe Human Rights
NGO Forum report naming the police as "major perpetrators
of human rights abuses" since 2000 as they have "changed
from a generally professional force" to that
"used by the ruling party . . . to suppress all
perceived opposition and retain power".
The Forum report
found that the police had been implicated as "torturers"
and their premises used as "places of torture and other abuse"
in scores of cases. It added that senior officers were blamed in
59 cases of torture while constables were fingered in 91, "refuting
government excuses that occasional abuses are carried out (by) a
few 'over-zealous' low level officers".
Sadly, except
for the Zimbabwe Times (12/12), the rest of the private media either
missed the story or carried it as a footnote in other reports on
rights violations.
None of the
government media reported on it.
The media's
failure to adequately report on human rights abuses in the country
was also illustrated in the Forum report, which carried a graph
illustrating the number of cases it recorded and those reported
by the media since 2000.
Notably, the
graph shows that media reports on rights abuses dropped sharply
after the government closure of The Daily News, further exposing
the underlying intentions of the authorities' tyrannical media
laws, which have eroded the public's right to adequate and
truthful information on issues affecting their lives.
Despite this
however, the private media carried 14 stories that continued to
expose other rights abuses during the week. The reports recorded
nine new incidents of rights violations and named opposition supporters,
university students, members of the public, human rights lawyers
and WOZA activists as victims while implicating mainly state security
agents as perpetrators.
The official
media ignored these incidents.
Instead, they
actually contrived to portray government's failed attempt
to manipulate the British-based Channel 4 journalists into producing
a sanitised documentary on Zimbabwe to buttress official propaganda
that Britain was relentlessly scheming against the country.
The Herald (15/12),
for example, dishonestly claimed the journalists - suspected
to be "intelligence officers" - were sent to "do
a damning documentary on Zimbabwe", which was
"to be used as a basis to extend the illegal economic
sanctions London and its fellow EU members have slapped Harare with".
ZTV (13/12, 9pm) reinforced this conspiracy in a 30-minute programme
titled, British machinations exposed.
A clearer picture
of the matter only appeared in the Zimbabwe Independent (15/12).
The paper revealed that the authorities were enraged after discovering
that the journalists, accredited on condition that they produced
a favourable documentary, planned to record a less than favourable
image of the country's crisis.
View MMPZ's fact
sheet
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