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Censorship and inadequate news coverage
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Extracted from Weekly Media Update 2007-41
Monday October 15th - Sunday October 21st 2007
October 25, 2007

The government media failed to holistically report pertinent political and economic developments in the country during the week. Although they carried 43 stories (ZBC [11] and government papers [32]) on these issues, they failed to give informed updates on the authorities' preparations for next year's harmonised elections and the extent to which hyperinflation and poor service delivery, characterised by incessant water and power cuts, had negatively affected the country.

The government media's poor showing was underlined by their censorship of human rights abuses against perceived government opponents, allegedly committed by state security agents in most cases. Apart from their apparent indifferent treatment of electoral issues, the private media fared better and gave more comprehensive coverage of the economic and political crises troubling the country. This was reflected in the 68 reports they carried on these issues. Of these, 30 were in the private electronic media and 38 in private papers.

a) The blackout - and inflation

Despite the country's capital continuing to suffer for a second week from what must evidently have been the most extensive and persistent power failure the city has ever experienced, the government media incredibly all but ignored the crisis that forced shops and industries to close, and witnessed powerless hospitals transferring critical patients and supplies to "areas of safety". For example, ZTV (17/10, 6pm) and Spot FM (17/10, 8pm) waited for nearly 10 days before simply citing a statement by the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority attributing the loss of power to more than 25 Harare suburbs to cable faults and vandalism. The government papers simply pretended the self-evident crisis did not exist.

The Sunday Mail Metro (21/10) even reduced the power shortages - that have also resulted in the widespread use of firewood - to a comedy by giving the impression that people were now using "bonfires" because they were fashionable and rekindled the tradition of story-telling. No effort was made by these media to hold ZESA or government to account for the blackout, or to demand some solution, or even to assess the cost and extent of the crisis.

The pattern remained unbroken in the government's coverage of the ongoing water crisis and the rise in inflation, up to another record high of 7 982 percent in September.

ZBC completely ignored reporting the new inflation figures, while The Herald and Chronicle (18/10) buried the news in their business sections.

Altogether, these media carried 31 reports on these issues (ZBC [11] and government Press [20]), mainly based on official pronouncements and devoid of information that could have been useful to the public.

Only the private media provided a critical perspective of the issues in their 23 reports on these topics (11 in the private electronic media and 12 in the private Press).

Not only did they highlight the disastrous effects of the continuing power failure, they predicted worsening power shortages due to plummeting local electricity production as well as government's failure to raise the cash to pay for imports.

In addition, they reported the rise in inflation and attempted to explain its causes and its effects on the economy.

b) Human rights violations

The government media completely ignored cases of human rights violations allegedly committed by state security agents and ZANU PF youths against perceived government opponents. As a result, their audiences remained ignorant of these developments, which were only reported in the private media.This week they recorded 15 fresh incidents of rights abuses, including one murder, and the assault, arrest and harassment of mostly civic rights activists, students and members of the MDC. In one incident, the online publication Zimbabwe Times (15/10), Studio 7 (16/10) and The Standard reported the death of an MDC member, Fibion Mafukidze, from injuries sustained after he was allegedly assaulted by soldiers and ZANU PF youths in Gutu recently.

The Zimbabwe Times also reported Maxwell Mazambani (last year's MDC candidate for Ward Five in Gutu in last year's elections) as battling for his life at a private Harare hospital after being "brutally" assaulted allegedly by soldiers and ZANU PF activists on September 25. Mazambani, whose kidneys were reportedly damaged, was reported to have been abducted from his rural home by "six soldiers and three others" driving "a white Nissan truck that belongs to the wife of Finance Minister Samuel Mumbengegwi" and "viciously assaulted at Eastdale Farm".

It was against this background that the Gazette and The Zimbabwean reported the MDC as having threatened to pull out of the SADC-led talks between their party and ZANU PF citing "escalating violence" against its supporters. The papers reported the opposition party claiming it had recorded 4 122 human rights violations between January and June this year, which included seven murders and 18 cases of rape. In addition, it alleged police had disrupted 103 of its rallies since April.

c) Elections

In view of the fact that four elections are due to be held at once early next year (parliamentary, presidential, the Senate and municipal elections), none of the media have begun to investigate how the Electoral Commission is going to manage such a complex process. The government has not provided the electorate with any useful information about the delimitation of constituency and ward boundaries, which will radically change due to the increase in the number of constituencies and the expansion of municipal boundaries, and how this will have a bearing on the voters' rolls and registration.

Almost all the 11 stories the government media carried on electoral issues were passive reports of official pronouncements declaring preparations as being "on course" without any effort to verify such claims.For example, The Herald and Chronicle (16/10) suffocated revelations before a Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Public Accounts by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) that they faced a host of problems ahead of the polls.Chief among these, said ZEC, was inadequate funding, critical shortage of vehicles, fuel, and manpower. The papers also failed to clarify the continued role of the Registrar-General's office in the running of elections, except to carry even more confusing revelations by a ZEC official that their election materials and assets were "still in the hands" of that office.

There was no clear explanation either on the reasons behind the sudden introduction of a new mobile voter registration exercise. ZTV (17/10, 6pm), Spot FM (18/10, 8pm) and The Herald and Chronicle (19/10) confined themselves to passively reporting the R-G, Tobaiwa Mudede, saying the three-week programme was a "mop-up" exercise "targeting areas that were not covered satisfactorily" in the previous registration exercise because of "various reasons". The stations did not ask him to identify the sidelined areas and why they had been overlooked in the first place, especially as his office had previously claimed that the exercise had been conducted successfully.

Instead of asking the electoral authorities sensible questions about what they were doing to ensure that Voting Day for the four simultaneous elections would not become a repeat of the chaotic polling exercise of the 2002 presidential and mayoral elections, the government media focused their attention on ZANU PF's campaign activities while ignoring those of its political opponents. For example, ZBC carried 12 reports on the campaign activities of the ruling party and none on the opposition MDC. In addition, these reports suppressed news of any dissent within the party over President Mugabe's candidacy in next year's presidential poll. The private media were equally uninformative about the electoral processes.

Except for two reports: one by Studio 7 (17/10) that quoted a Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN) official noting the limited time left for effective "election reform and logistical preparations for elections to be free and fair; and another on a voter education campaign by Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition (The Zimbabwean 18/10), nothing else was said on the matter. Otherwise, the rest of the 14 reports these media carried basically focused on in-house fighting within the ruling party and the Morgan Tsvangirai-led MDC. For example, The Financial Gazette (18/10), the Zimbabwe Independent (19/10) and ZimOnline, reported the escalation of tensions in ZANU PF over ongoing 'national' marches by war veterans in support of Mugabe's presidential candidature ahead of the party's congress in December. The Standard (21/10) reported rifts in the Tsvangirai MDC formation following its dissolution of the Women's assembly led by Lucia Matibenga.

The difference in the way the official and private media handled these topics is illustrated by the way the government papers and the private electronic media sourced their comments. See Figs 1 and 2.

Fig 1: Voice distribution in the official papers

While the official papers reported the issues mostly through the lens of the authorities, the private electronic media used alternative voices to interrogate the soundness of government pronouncements.

Fig 2: Voice distribution in the private electronic media

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