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Daily Media Update No.41
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
April 29, 2008

Post-election focus
With the print media market again at their mercy today The Herald and Chronicle were able to continue suppressing news of the results of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission's contentious vote recounting exercise.The papers confined themselves to passively repeating Saturday's news that the commission would soon invite the contesting candidates to the verification of the presidential election results. No effort was made by the papers to extract a clear list of the recounted constituency results from the commission, or a definitive date for the verification of the presidential election returns.

Instead, the two dailies again attempted to divert the public's attention from the anxiously awaited results with conspiracy theories portraying domestic and international criticism of ZEC's handling of the polls and the subsequent post-election violence as part of Western machinations to effect "regime change" in Zimbabwe.
This was reflected in the 12 reports the government dailies published on the topic.

A statement by ZEC's deputy chief elections officer Utloile Silaigwana, repeating information already given by the commission's chairman, George Chiweshe on Saturday, provided The Herald and the Chronicle with the excuse to rehash old information as news, quoting Silaigwana as saying ZEC was "still compiling results from the 23 constituencies and these would be made public upon completion".

But they made no effort to reconcile this with their own unattributed report saying that the MDC (Tsvangirai) had retained the Masvingo Central and Masvingo West constituencies, while ZANU PF had retained the Masvingo Senate seat. Despite reporting that the results were displayed at the venues of the recounting centres, it remained surprising why the official papers had failed to inform their readers of the final outcome of the recount.

Meanwhile, the papers' editorials maintained their conspiracy propaganda against voices critical of the authorities' unacceptable delay in releasing all the March election results. An editorial in The Herald, for example, portrayed Zimbabwe as under siege from the West, accusing the US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Jendayi Frazer, of "gallivanting" across the (Southern African) region to "arm twist" SADC leaders "to ensure an ouster of President Mugabe and . . . ZANU PF".

Apart from claiming that the US wanted to "attack Zimbabwe militarily" as part of its regime change efforts, the editorial attacked MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, as a Western stooge and a "willing mercenary" who "pushes forward the reactionary imperialist agenda", without providing a shred of credible evidence. The writer alleged that if Tsvangirai became the next Zimbabwean president he would "neutralize militant war veterans . . . " and "restore the white dominated agrarian regime, as was the case before 2000".

Against this background, the editorial called upon Zimbabweans to "unite" and "defend" the country in the widely expected presidential election run-off, describing it as the "last option to choose between rule by Washington and self-determination".

In another story, The Herald distorted news of the resumption of a case in which former Zimbabwe white commercial farmers are challenging government's seizure of their farms in the SADC Tribunal. It also drowned news that the tribunal granted the farmers interim relief against eviction on March 28 2008 and attempted to discredit the ruling by linking it to last month's controversial polls. The Herald cited "government insiders" saying they suspected "political gerrymandering" in the court proceedings and "found it odd that the judgment was delivered on the eve of Zimbabwe's elections".

One of the sources claimed the MDC "knew what the tribunal's judgment would be," and planned to use it as an excuse to reverse the land reform programme if it won the presidential elections. No attempt to substantiate this dishonest "analysis" was made.

Rather than independently investigate reports of escalating violence across the country, The Herald and Chronicle continued to feed from official pronouncements and allowed police spokesman Wayne Bvudzijena to dismiss a High Court ruling ordering the police to free the scores of people they had arrested at the MDC's Harare headquarters on Friday, simply on the basis that "he had not seen it".

The papers then passively cited a Ministry of Information statement blaming the MDC (Tsvangirai) for the violence, claiming that "some excited" MDC-T supporters "attacked soldiers . . . in Rusape leading to the death of one person and injury to two others".

No attempt to seek corroboration from the police on the circumstances surrounding this death was made, nor did the papers seek comment from the MDC. Instead, the papers reported the ministry "warning" against such attacks and "dismissing" reports of a state-sponsored campaign of violent retribution against opposition supporters.
In fact, The Herald and Chronicle focused their stories on the violence on Bvudzijena's announcement that 29 of the 215 people arrested at the MDC headquarters had been released.

Fig 1 shows the sourcing patterns in the government papers.

Fig 1: Voice distribution in The Herald and Chronicle

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