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Economic meltdown
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Weekly Media Update 2006-50
Monday December 11^th 2006 – Sunday December 17^th 2006

AS the year ended, there appeared no marked difference in the way the government media covered crucial national issues. Their coverage of the country’s economic meltdown, the most topical issue in all media during the year, demonstrates this point.

They continued suffocating alternative voices while passively promoting government views, even when these official pronouncements were mostly half-truths and at variance with reality.

For example, this week the official media projected a sanitized picture of the country’s economic problems in the 46 stories they carried [ZBC (25) and government Press (21)] on the subject. They largely interpreted the crisis through the lens of the authorities (see Fig 1).

Fig. 1 Voice distribution in the official Press

As a result, only the authorities’ perception of the country’s economic outlook filtered through these media at the expense of alternative views.

In contrast, the private media were forthright on the poor state of the economy in the 46 stories they carried on the topic during the week. Of these 33 appeared in the private Press while the private electronic media carried 13. Almost all their stories exposed the extent of the country's economic rot, which they attributed to government's poor policies. The scenario replayed itself throughout the year. For example, during the year MMPZ carried 50 updates on topical issues in the media, 35 of which included the topic relating to economic issues. The government media carried 3,081 of the stories while the private media had 2 502 reports.

But as in the week, the official media's treatment of the subject did not reflect an informed analysis of the country's economic difficulties. Their stories were largely piecemeal and avoided addressing the question of official economic mismanagement.

In fact, they narrowly blamed all those outside government, particularly the West and "unscrupulous" businesses, for the economic mess, characterised by hyperinflation, low production, unemployment and the galloping cost of living and severe commodity and foreign currency shortages.

Instead of discussing these issues in the context of government's policy deficiencies, they simply depicted the authorities as working tirelessly to arrest the decline through government programmes such as the fiscal and monetary policies, the National Economic Development Priority Programme and other ad-hoc interventionist measures.

The passive manner in which the official media tackled the economic issues throughout the year is illustrated by the dominance of official comments in their stories.

Notably, most of the alternative voices were reported in the context of endorsing government economic policies while ordinary people's concerns on the economic decline were unexplored. The same trend replicated itself on ZBC.

Only the private media were critical as seen by their use of alternative voices to test the relevance and prudence of government's economic programmes throughout the year.

View MMPZ's fact sheet

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