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Daily Media Update No.44
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
May 02, 2008

Post election focus
The Herald and Chronicle continued to deflect attention from Zimbabwe's post-election crisis, including ZANU PF's historic defeat to the MDC in the March 29 parliamentary and presidential elections, with propagandist onslaughts against the West and the opposition over the country's problems.

Although they carried updates on the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission's ongoing "verification" of the inordinately delayed presidential election results, they did not attempt to establish the winner of the poll. This was even after yesterday's leakage of the results by the authorities, whose official confirmation today showed that MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai had won the poll by 47.9 percent against Robert Mugabe's 42.3, paving the way for a run-off.
There was also still no acknowledgement in the government dailies of the MDC victory in the parliamentary elections nearly a week after the completion of recounts in 23 constituencies where ZANU PF alleged ballot tampering.
The Herald, for example, simply reported that the results of the House of Assembly, Senate and council polls have since been announced. Neither did the official dailies expose the state-sanctioned crackdown on dissenting voices across the country. These issues only found space in the private weeklies, The Financial Gazette (1/5) and the Zimbabwe Independent (2/5).

The ZANU PF dailies, for example, passively reported ZEC as having presented its official results of the presidential poll to the candidates' representatives for "comparison" with the contestants' own figures without seeking to establish the ZEC figures.

They also did not establish the extent to which the MDC and independent candidate Langton Towungana's results did not "tally" with ZEC's, or what the results were. Instead, they rehashed previous claims by ZANU PF's Patrick Chinamasa that results from ZANU PF, MDC and independent monitors had shown that "no candidate garnered the mandatory 51 percent to be declared the outright winner". Otherwise, the rest of the 10 election-related stories that the official dailies carried either sought to build ZANU PF and President Mugabe's images or simply demonised the West and the opposition for seeking to remove ZANU PF illegally. For example, The Herald and Chronicle reported Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade delivering a "special message of solidarity to President Mugabe and the people of Zimbabwe" in the country's post-election crisis, but censored any critical remarks about the authorities' delay of the presidential results.

This selective coverage of the matter was also evident in the way the dailies covered Workers' Day celebrations.
While the Chronicle accused the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions of aligning themselves with the MDC by "chanting the . . . party's slogans and politics at the expense of propagating issues affecting workers", there was no such critical examination of the rival Zimbabwe Federation of Trade Unions' open support for ZANU PF at their May Day commemorations.

The Herald, for example, passively reported ZFTU President Joseph Chinotimba criticising the Confederation of South African Trade Unions for influencing the South African Transport Workers union to protest against the offloading of a consignment of arms destined for Zimbabwe in isolation of the state-sanctioned violence against ZANU PF opponents. He was quoted saying: "It is common knowledge that any country should defend itself and as workers we need peace and sanity to prevail and, therefore, there is nothing sinister about the weapons."

In fact, apart from a ZANU PF campaign disguised as a donation by President Mugabe's wife, Grace, to victims of political violence in Manicaland, the government papers suppressed news on the endemic purge. The paper only carried a brief court report on its page three in which seven ZANU PF supporters were accused of assaulting resettled farmers in Beatrice.

In contrast, the private weeklies gave informed and extensive coverage of the topic in 32 reports. These included updates on the escalating post-election violence, recording nine incidents, and the international community's revulsion at the unfolding events.They also highlighted how the authorities had leaked the presidential results to the international media before their verification had been completed in a bid to sustain their pursuit of a run-off.

In its lead story, The Zimbabwe Independent reported that ZEC was faced with a fresh problem "sparked off by ZEC's leakage of official results to defeated ZANU PF leaders" who then passed them on to the international media. It quoted the MDC saying "it was shocked by the conduct of ZEC and ZANU PF officials, who after failing to release the figures for more than a month, leaked the results to the 'hostile media'".

The same story also contended that Tsvangirai was set to participate in the imminent presidential run-off despite his public remarks saying he wouldn't. It cited as evidence an alleged pact recently signed between the two formations of the MDC in which they agreed to campaign together "to ensure Tsvangirai wins the run-off election".
The Independent also questioned the logic behind ZANU PF's demands for vote recounts. Its Muckraker column argued that after the recounts, "nothing systematic" had been found that could prove electoral fraud and did not warrant "the politically-inspired arrest of polling agents". Both the Independent and the Gazette highlighted the police intensifying its blitz against civic society. These included police raids at NGOs: Crisis Coalition, Centre for Research and Development and Plan International in Mutoko.

In addition, The Financial Gazette reported that most schools had failed to open for the second term as most teachers faced intimidation and violent retribution from alleged militants for ZANU PF's electoral defeat.

The weeklies also revealed that the US was considering whether broaden its sanctions list to include more than 200 senior military officials allegedly deployed in the country's 10 provinces to spearhead the violence campaign.
They reported US ambassador to Zimbabwe James McGee telling a Press conference that he was "personally" recording the incidents of violence and interviewing the victims of the alleged terror campaign and had since forwarded a dossier to the Zimbabwe government containing pictures of the assaulted villagers.

Said McGee: "We have affidavits; we have the names of the perpetrators. We know the perpetrators and there will be justice at the end of the day."

Reportedly, McGee said he had since handled 500 cases, one of which attributed the violence to the MDC.
"The government of Zimbabwe asked us for evidence (of violence). We have availed it", the Gazette quoted him saying.

Figs 1 and 2 illustrate the sourcing patterns in the official and private Press.

Fig 1. Voice distribution in The Herald and Chronicle

Fig 2. Voice distribution in The Financial Gazette and Zimbabwe Independent

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