Back to Index

This article participates on the following special index pages:

Public Media making noticeable effort towards equitable coverage
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Extracted from Weekly Media Update 2008-9
Monday March 3rd - Sunday March 9th 2008

MMPZ notes that since new regulations governing media conduct during elections were promulgated into law on Friday, March 7th the public media have made noticeable efforts to limit their bias towards the ruling party. While coverage of ZANU PF still dominates the news bulletins of the national public broadcaster, ZBC, and the columns of the government-controlled Press, initial findings indicate that the opposition MDC and to a lesser extent, independent presidential candidate Simba Makoni, have been receiving some airtime on radio and television. However, the MDC activities, particularly their rallies, are still largely ignored in the official Press, while Makoni's visibility is still mostly restricted to reports relating to his "betrayal" of the ruling party.

Until March 7th, there was no attempt by ZBC to adhere to basic national public broadcasting standards providing for fair and equitable coverage to all shades of opinion. Instead, the airwaves were saturated with ZANU PF propaganda disguised as news (as illustrated in our report below which mostly covers the week's media output leading up to March 7th). The regulations state that all the election contestants should receive equitable coverage in the editorial content of the public broadcaster and that its news and current affairs programmes should be fair, balanced, accurate and complete. They also prohibit reporters and presenters from expressing their personal views in such programmes.

With regard to political advertising, the regulations state that each of ZBC's stations "shall allocate four hours of available purchasable time during an election period for election advertisements, which shall be distributed equitably to political parties and candidates . . . taking into consideration the number of constituencies being contested by the respective political parties"..

It remains to be seen whether ZBC will meet the requirements of this provision.

While MMPZ has noticed a decline in the intensity of the partisan coverage favouring the ruling party, ZBC's bulletins cannot yet be described as providing equitable coverage of all the main election contestants. Statutory Instrument 33 of 2008 only allows for appeals against inequitable coverage to be initiated by aggrieved political parties, but not by individual members of the public or civic organisations. This evidently constitutes a serious weakness in the regulations because the public, as the primary consumers of the public media - and their main source of revenue - have no avenue to seek redress against biased reporting.

MMPZ appeals to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, which is responsible for enforcing the media regulations, to call on government to broaden this restrictive clause to allow the public to bring their grievances to the commission.

During the week, the privately owned weekly, The Zimbabwean (6/3), carried a letter from the chairman of the Human Rights NGO Forum complaining about the paper's lead story the previous week, which stated that the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, had claimed that the State's use of torture in Zimbabwe was widespread. Nowak had been on a 24-hour visit to Zimbabwe as guest speaker at the Forum's 10th anniversary celebrations and had specifically stated that he would confine his remarks to the management and reporting of torture generally and would not discuss its incidence in Zimbabwe. MMPZ attended the function and at no time was the issue of torture in Zimbabwe raised. However, in response to the Forum's letter, the paper's unnamed chief reporter stated that Prof Nowak did not make it clear that his comments had been "off the record during the entire duration of the interview on the sidelines of the (Forum's) anniversary".

MMPZ believes that anybody attending the function could not possibly have misunderstood that any comments Nowak might have made privately would certainly have been off the record. Although the reporter apologises for "betraying the confidence of Prof Nowak", the writer "vehemently rejects any suggestion that we did not follow due process". In this case the issue of "due process" would certainly have entailed the ethical journalistic precaution of ensuring that Nowak's comments were "reportable". It is evident that the reporter ignored Nowak's public statement explaining that he was unable to address the issue of torture in Zimbabwe because of the "unofficial" status of his visit to the country and reported on what may have been private remarks anyway for the sake of a "good story".

If the issue of torture in Zimbabwe had been news, the reporter's defence of the "public interest" might have held value. As it is, MMPZ believes that an ethical confidence was broken that not only damages the reputation of journalistic practice in Zimbabwe, but also unnecessarily creates problems for civic organizations, particularly those monitoring human rights in the country.

Visit the MMPZ fact sheet

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP