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Transcript of 'Hot Seat' with foreign correspondent Peta Thornycroft
Violet Gonda, SW Radio Africa
November 06, 2007

http://swradioafrica.com/pages/hotseat191107.htm

VIOLET GONDA: My guest on the programme Hot Seat this week is veteran journalist Peta Thornycroft, who has just won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Women's Media Foundation, the IWMF. Peta is a foreign correspondent for the UK Daily Telegraph and Voice of America. Congratulations on the Award Peta.

PETA THORNYCROFT: Thank you. I also work for Independent Newspapers in South Africa, in fact I probably do more for them now than for other papers because the stories, the story on Zimbabwe has really gone off the boil. Thank you very much.

VIOLET: And I know you have plenty to say about the crisis in Zimbabwe especially looking at the opposition and the media. But could you tell us first a bit about your award, how did it come about?

THORNYCROFT: I got an email from a South African colleague in March this year. Somebody I've worked with Maureen Isaacson I've worked with for many years and of course I've worked much longer in South Africa than I ever have in Zimbabwe. I have no idea, I still have no idea why, I think she might be a member of this organisation or she knows of it and she was determined and so were some of her colleagues, her colleagues in the South African press, determined to put my name forward for this Lifetime achievement award. So they did and they emailed me and I was in Harare and it was at the time when Morgan Tsvangirai was being tortured. I was just so busy, I could barely keep up with my work at that stage in fact I couldn't keep up with it and I just was telling her all the time, I haven't got time for this, I don't keep any cuttings, I haven't got anything I've ever done, this is a load of rubbish, I'm not going do this and she just persisted. I didn't actually, I think I sent her an elderly CV because it was old, its one I've had lying around in my laptop for ages and I did send it to her. She then did it all and the next thing is I got an email saying I'd won. In fact when I was in Washington I discovered that it is quite a lengthy process, they get these nominations from all sorts of people around the world and it's not for one. So in other words this award was not for reporting on Zimbabwe per say it was reporting for 25years. Tremendously interesting periods of time both in South Africa at the height of apartheid and in the dying days of apartheid and also as we led up to democratic elections in 1994 which was tumultuous. Those were extremely tumultuous days for journalists. So it was broader than just Zimbabwe although I noticed in the promotional material that they put out, that the International Women's Media Foundation mostly focused on Zimbabwe, but certainly in my CV and the material I sent to them I certainly sent them more of my earlier life as a journalist in South Africa.

VIOLET: Right and what did they actually want to know about Zimbabwe when you were in America, to receive the award.

THORNYCROFT: Well the IWMF produced promotional materials so I did write them some stuff and sent them some copy and struggled to get back copies of things, struggled terribly cause if you didn't keep your work before the internet you really struggled. And so I told them quite a lot about Zimbabwe since I went up there in 2001. This period, of course I've worked in Zimbabwe in previous periods. I told them quite a lot and then I was a member of panels in Washington, New York and Los Angeles. I was on various panels where I was interviewed. Can't even remember how many times I was interviewed by quite a number of news organisations. Perhaps the most, the longest and most comprehensive interview was that for National Public Radio in Washington and it went out on a programme called Fresh Air. It was an hour long interview and it dealt with Zimbabwe, and I was able to dispel a lot of myths, particularly myths like trying to equate Zimbabwe with North Korea. It seems to be in people's minds that Zimbabwe is like North Korea and so I tried to tell the story of what it was like and a very, very different situation from some of the winners of the courage awards by the IWMF who are working for the McClatchy Bureau an American news bureau working in Baghdad (IRAQ). I mean their stories are how they cope everyday and the bombs, the bombs which not only kill people in the war but have killed their own families, including their children as they try and struggle to get the translations done, get their copies out and they do run a most effective blog out of McClatchy. It was so extraordinary meeting them. And then Lydia Cacho whose a journalist from Mexico who's been hunting down these pedophiles in Mexico and she gave us the statistics of journalists killed, arrested etc in Mexico. Mexico is worse than almost any country in Africa for the way it treats journalists. Lydia is constantly under the watch of state guards. I mean in New York, Washington and Los Angeles. In New York it was the NYPD who looked after her, she had to be provided with two permanent bodyguards because she is under such threat in Mexico she can't even walk down the streets there without protection and she has nailed a whole lot of politicians. She's the first journalist to have taken the government to court, to the Supreme Court. So I mean with these journalist who've lived these extraordinary lives I have to say in comparison Zimbabwe seemed very tame when one saw what they are going through. And therefore I had to describe how it's a very different kind of war in Zimbabwe, it's the lack of certainty, it's sometimes just a lack of a story. If you actually think of what's going on in Zimbabwe today you have to be extremely creative to find a new angle about what's going on in Zimbabwe today and that's what I try to tell people and it was against a background I'd used in my speech. The background I'd used in my speech was that women's life expectancy is 34 to 38 years and of course the highest inflation rate in the world at over 8000%. And so those were the bench marks I used to show that Zimbabwe, why Zimbabwe has become a world story because there is this feeling sometimes that Zimbabwe is kind of an obsession of the British press. Certainly the American press knows very, very little about us. There's the occasional story maybe once a month down a page in the features section in the New York Times. There's the occasional story on National Public Radio actually normally when I've done it, there's very, very little about Zimbabwe. They barely know the name and I'm talking about well read people who read two or three newspapers a day and listen to radio stations they know very little about Zimbabwe. And unless the story gets a bit busier I suspect they're not going to know, ever know very much. And so I was really one of the first journalists able to be, to address an enormously influential and powerful group of people in all three states, in Washington DC, New York and Los Angeles about the situation in Zimbabwe.

VIOLET: I actually understand you met some Hollywood celebrities like Angelina Jolie when you were in Los Angeles?

THORNYCROFT: Oh I did, I had dinner with Angelina Jolie and we shared jokes and she's terribly intelligent and my god she was well briefed on Zimbabwe. She really had done her homework before I met her and she had done her homework on me which is all a bit embarrassing. I thought it was a bit overblown and basically I've never been a journalist who kind of goes for the limelight or you know in that celebrity sphere that is very American and very different from the upbringing I've had in journalism. Nevertheless, nevertheless it was good to meet her, she's just done this extraordinary film about Daniel Pearl the Wall Street journalist who was killed in Pakistan. She plays Daniel Pearl's wife. Her husband Brad Pitt, the night she came to give me my award, was babysitting the kids. He was one of the producers of that film. So a) she had become interested in journalism, b) she has a particular interest in Africa as she has two children with strong African connections. Hers and Brad's baby was born in Namibia and they've adopted an Ethiopian Child. So they are very, very interested in Africa and she's terribly nice. I mean she's just so ordinary. But my god you see the Hollywood press flashing away with their flashes and it's a totally different world!

I mean Christiana Amanpour the chief correspondent of CNN who is a working professional working Journalist turning stuff out day by day, she's a superstar in Washington and she told me that she really is a superstar I mean in Los Angeles but whereas in London she can walk around and nobody notices her - that nobody has any idea who she is. It's only really in America where American anchors are superstars and she's not the anchor she's the chief correspondent she's a working daily journalist. It's a very different pace of life and different exposure and different resources. Of course the stories in the American press are so much longer. Very long stories, I was amazed by that and very little foreign news in the electronic media. It's a very different CNN that we in Zimbabwe see if you are lucky enough to have DSTV and ZESA, very different CNN to the one Americans see.

VIOLET: I was also surprised at the lack of international coverage or coverage of international issues in the American media, I'm here in America at school, and there's nothing, absolutely nothing about what's happening in many countries especially in Africa and I find that quite disturbing.

THORNYCROFT: Yah in fact the major story is of course Iraq and now Iran and they do, I mean I did see in the New York Times and LA Times, everyday there are two, three or four stories on Iraq because of course they've got soldiers there who are dying, American soldiers there. But there's very little on Africa and as for Zimbabwe there's absolutely nothing. And there has been stuff on Darfur because it's a UN issue but it's a very low priority story in America which is quite nice because people didn't know anything and they became quite curious about it.

VIOLET: And you know Peta over 30years of covering the situation in South Africa and in Zimbabwe, now what was the role of journalists during Apartheid in South Africa and how different is it now with the way the crisis in Zimbabwe has been covered by the Media.

THORNYCROFT: Well, just to go back to the International Women's Media Foundation they had of course honored Namibian journalist Gwen Lister and on their board is Ferriel Hafegee (sp) who is the editor of the Mail And Guardian on their board, so there is an African flavor to IWMF and they have done training programmes in Africa for women journalists especially the most recent one being how to report HIV/ AIDS which they did last year and I know they are anxious to do very more in Africa and you certainly are going to be seeing them around Southern Africa I'm sure next year.

I mean the difference in reporting South Africa and Zimbabwe from my point of view and the various times that I've been there is that leading up to the end of apartheid it was real hard news and it was shooting in the streets and it was everyday. I mean between 1991 and 1994 and the elections, more people were killed in civil society in that four year period than in the whole of all the previous years of apartheid put together. I mean it was between a 150 and 300 killed a month and then one looks at Zimbabwe's statistics in over seven years its about 350 to 400 deaths that have been attributed to political strife in that period so it's an entirely different scale to what happened in South Africa, it's an entirely different kind of war.

There were many press in South Africa, those were the freest years that South African press has ever had between 1991 and 1994. There was easy access to everyone because everyone wanted to be elected, everyone wanted to put their points over. But then as a background to that of course you had the constitutional negotiations which went on at CODESA forever and ever and ever. The most boring stories for those poor daily reporters that they had to do. That's why these particular negotiations going on now between the MDC and ZANU PF - when I knew that that was coming, I knew I also had to find something else to do to cheer my daily diary up because I know about constitutional negotiations and reporting them. They are difficult, everyone is doing deals in secret. Even if CODESA was done in public, it wasn't really, they all went off in secret to go and knock out a deal on one of the weekend retreats and we are going through the same thing on a much smaller scale in Zimbabwe and its extremely boring stuff to report. But back in South Africa as they were negotiating the constitution there was of course this appalling violence, I mean it was appalling. This isn't happening to any kind of the same extent in Zimbabwe. I mean of course it's a different kind of story - violence in Zimbabwe seems to me to be the dismantling of an entire economy, which is violence isn't it? It's making it impossible for people to feed themselves. That is extreme violence.

VIOLET: You've been particularly concerned with the way the domestic media has been covering the crisis in Zimbabwe. Can you tell us more about this?

THORNYCROFT: Domestic media I think here let's define this we mean Zimbabwean journalists basically writing for Zimbabwean audiences whether they be inside the country or outside the country is that correct?

VIOLET: That's right.

THORNYCROFT: Ok, in other words I as a foreign journalist I have a very different audience. I have an audience in the UK which is a very different audience from the one in South Africa, which is a very different audience to the African Service of VOA. I'm doing three different audiences more or less whenever I do a story. But I think the domestic media first of all the state stopped the Daily News, I mean the state has stopped newspapers from telling that story, and so if one looks back at the Daily News with hindsight being the perfect science and I don't think we realized it at the time, but I think the Daily News if I look back now, it was an MDC supporting newspaper.

Just as the Daily telegraph which I work for in the UK is a Tory supporting newspaper. I think we didn't say it at the time frankly, and maybe it wasn't important but the Daily News supported the MDC. And since its demise and naturally because of its demise a whole lot of other publications have arisen on the internet, you yourselves in London have emerged as a result of the repression, the failure of people to be able to get news from home so people like you and studio 7, ZimDaily, Zimonline, The Zimbabwean and Nyarota's one - The Times of Times of Zimbabwe I think it is, NewZimbabwe.com. Naturally those would emerge because it's so hard to get information from Zimbabwe apart from the Herald and then once a week The Independent and The Standard level of news. And then of course The Financial Gazette which there is a question mark over whether it is in fact owned by people who are aligned to the government or not . So I've been very disappointed with lots of the external media. ZimDaily I suppose I now view ZimDaily as an essential part of my life in covering Zimbabwe because it makes me laugh and the way they.

VIOLET: (interjects) It makes you laugh?

THORNYCROFT: Yah makes me laugh, I have shrieked with laughter at some of its stories and the way they have been hounding the Chefs' children - who are in universities and colleges overseas - and some of the comments that followed on their website made me scream with laughter. So I do not take it seriously as a news outlet, its kind of a sideline. When this really became quite difficult was when the MDC broke into two factions in October 2005 and with the exception of NewZimbabwe.com and I would say SWRadio Africa mostly - although there were individual people at SWRadio Africa who seemed to choose one faction over the other - but what was distressing was that all of those publications chose to support the Tsvangirai faction, which there's nothing wrong with that except in that they weren't therefore giving the other faction's point of view and for any comment that was going on whether it was on the economy, farming etcetera nearly all of that media (independent) would always quote from the Tsvangirai faction. So they could not call themselves independent because if they had been monitored as independent publications, say they were funded by public funds, they wouldn't have been allowed to do that. BBC could never have done that because it's funded, it gets public funds. So it was a pity that people when their emotions were high they couldn't get good coverage on a daily basis inside the country. Remembering that the Independent and the Standard newspapers actually got a very small population inside Harare basically and a small urban population.

The combination of the external media reached quite a high proportion of Zimbabweans that are either living in South Africa in exile or the UK, some inside the country but the message got around, so I think it was very sad that message that got around at that time. New Zimbabwe.Com as I saw them, tried very hard to source things with named sources or else one suspected that the sources that they didn't name were real people. I used to wonder sometimes with some of the other publications where on earth they got their stories from. And I think the foreign press just ignored it. We ignored the stories I think we hardly ever picked up a story from those outlets and quoted from them without doing work ourselves and checking if they were true. And often when I checked the stories out they weren't true.

VIOLET: But have things changed now? Do you think the media coverage is better now, it's more balanced?

THORNYCROFT: Yes, as I said something like ZimDaily I take just as an essential part of the light heartedness one of the few light hearted things about Zimbabwe, I love ZimDaily. Its not news, it's something else, it's an aberration but it's an amusing aberration. Zimonline has tried to be, to do better sourcing recently. And I think Zimonline has often tried to be good but I've never used them as basis for a story nor have I used actually any of the alternative publications - there is an old fashioned word we used to use in South Africa, as a basis for a story ever, because I'm always worried about the sourcing. Except I have used the New Zimbabwe.com because they very often have named sources. There are far too many stories on Zimbabwe that go out without named sources. And so one gets this extraordinary exaggeration. And The Zimbabwean newspaper which is mostly run by very experienced journalists who have had a lot of advantages in their lives, I'm quite shocked really at the standard of some of the reporting that goes out on The Zimbabwean - that it just doesn't fill the basics on the hard news pages. Their stories often do not have the basic requirements needed for a news story and it's the type of paper which really looks very nice and useful to people living in the UK - I haven't often found that some of the sensational front page stories stood up to any kind of professional scrutiny. And I think that's a pity. I think we need really good media, I think we need really good and accurate sources and we've all made mistakes and it's so easy to make a mistake because we work in a hideous situation where we can't get statistics, we can't get comments from the government, we can't trust any of the statistics. We have a hideously partisan state press in the Herald and the ZBC and you can't use them as a resource. It's very hard to balance our stories in the way we've all been taught to balance our stories - that there are always two sides to the story. How easy is it to get a quote from ZANU PF? It's damn nigh impossible!

So there are great hazards in it but I do think it is recently been getting better. Maybe people have got more resources, maybe the story has changed maybe its because the MDC faction loyal to founding president Morgan Tsvangirai is going through such trauma itself that some of his most loyal journalists in these various organizations, like Studio 7, etcetera who've always been very loyal to him are beginning to question their loyalty. I don't know, I don't know if that's the answer but it does seem to be getting a bit better maybe there are more resources as well.

VIOLET: Now Peta let me pause here because we've run out of time but we are going to continue with this discussion next week and I'd like to hear your thoughts on the turmoil you made reference to that's in the MDC, and also to hear your thoughts about the third way and ZANU PF. Thank you very much for the time being.

THORNYCROFT: Oh not at all. Thank You.

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