Back to Index

This article participates on the following special index pages:

Daily Media Update No.42
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
April 30, 2008

Post-election focus
Today's fairy tales in The Herald and Chronicle began with news that Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono was due to "wave his magic wand once more and bring relief to the majority of Zimbabweans experiencing varied economic challenges" in the monetary policy he was due to deliver today. Such utterly comic and biased coverage of Zimbabwe's economic crisis was also reflected in the ZANU PF-controlled papers' coverage of the political crisis afflicting the country.

For example, they disguised the potential for further delaying a resolution to the controversy surrounding the release of the presidential election results by offering hope for a solution in the form of news that contestants would be invited to the start of the presidential election verification process at 2pm tomorrow.

At the same time the two dailies maintained their dogmatic propaganda offensive against all those critical of the authorities' obstructive management of the entire election exercise, while quietly suffocating news of the parliamentary election recount results, which has relegated ZANU PF to being the minority party in Parliament for the first time since independence.

News that the police had released, without charge, 180 people arrested at the MDC's Harare headquarters last Friday, was also deliberately withheld from the public.

The papers also misrepresented important news that the United Nations Security Council had, for the first time, discussed the political crisis in Zimbabwe by reporting that the world body had "snubbed" the MDC's "attempts to gatecrash" the meeting. Zimbabwe's ambassador to the UN, Boniface Chidyausiku, was reported saying the MDC delegation had been "told off" and only got to meet the Council's secretariat, as if this was a sign of failure.

Only the private and foreign media reported that the MDC mission had gone to New York to "lobby" Security Council members over the political violence and to appeal to them to send aid and a special envoy to the country. But in the ZANU PF dailies the purpose of the meeting was never made clear. As a result, this breakthrough in drawing world attention to the Zimbabwe crisis was never adequately addressed. Instead, The Herald continued to present Western countries as being the cause of the crisis and stepped up its propaganda campaign against them.

For example, it claimed that after the MDC had failed to get into the Council meeting, "its backers - led by the United Kingdom, Belgium, France and the United States - unsuccessfully tried to get the Security Council to discuss Zimbabwe". Reportedly, the move was blocked by eight countries, among them China, Russia and South Africa.

The same story also chronicled alleged conspiracies by Britain to manipulate SADC countries, especially Botswana, Tanzania and Zambia "to force them to condemn President Mugabe". Citing an alleged letter written to the British government by the opposition Conservative shadow secretary for foreign affairs, the story also 'exposed' how the MDC "has been working closely with the British to circumvent the electoral process by installing Morgan Tsvangirai as President". Nothing in the story supported this blatant editorial fiction and no effort was made to verify the authenticity of the letter, especially as the paper has recently been publishing forged and fictitious documents intended to discredit the opposition.

The paper's three editorials merely amplified the conspiracies of a Western-driven agenda to "illegally" remove President Mugabe and his ZANU PF government. The editorials, which purportedly spoke on behalf of Zimbabweans, but barely gave them any voice, sought to depict them as happy with the current situation. For example, one of the editorials claimed that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's 'charade' was being exposed by the fact that "Zimbabweans who cast their votes and whose future is affected by the poll's outcome or lack thereof are not making as much, if any, noise as he is".

This was not reconciled with the post-election tension in the country, characterised by widespread reports of state-sanctioned violence and intimidation of opposition supporters countrywide. For example, there was no news in the government dailies on the fate of the 180 MDC supporters arrested at the MDC's headquarters accused in earlier editions of the papers, of being responsible for political violence, among them victims of the reported ZANU PF terror campaign in the rural areas.

In contrast, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, whose suppression of the presidential election result is the cause of the country's untenable election standoff, has never received any criticism from the ZANU PF-controlled dailies.
For example, they have not questioned ZEC's seemingly unending verification of the presidential vote, or attempted to explain the commission's bizarre logic of asking the contesting parties to bring their own results and only release the final result once all the parties agree.

Despite the fact that the elections were held 32 days ago, the two papers continued to avoid questioning this extraordinary delay due to "transport and communication challenges coupled with a recount of the votes in 23 constituencies".

Why these problems had not so badly delayed the announcement of the parliamentary and senatorial election results remained unexplored. This notwithstanding, The Herald and Chronicle passively reported Police Commissioner-General Augustine Chihuri trying to give a semblance of decency to ZANU PF 's rigging claims during a police pass-out parade in Harare, where he said the police had so far "handled 100 case of electoral fraud", mostly by election officers. Nothing was said about the evidently trivial nature of these cases.

Neither did the papers reconcile Chihuri's fraud allegations with his defence of the electoral commission, saying: "No amount of intimidation or criticism should deter ZEC from doing a thorough job . . . " Nor did they even question Chihuri's gross abuse of office as reflected in his efforts to undermine the people's will by his declaration that, "Placing wrong candidates in office who were selected by the people is evil and should never be allowed at all cost". These reports were part of nine that the official dailies carried on the election related issues.

Fig. 1 illustrates the sourcing pattern for the government-controlled papers

Fig 1. Voice distribution in The Herald and Chronicle

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