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Daily Media Update No.45
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
May 03, 2008

Post election focus
For the first time since independence the authorities have been obliged to announce that President Mugabe suffered a clear electoral defeat at the hands of his political rival, the MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai. But in reporting this historic event, The Herald contrived to offend every basic journalistic standard as the world commemorated World press Freedom Day by dishonestly presenting the result of the March 29 presidential election as a contest that had "no winner", according to its front page lead story.

Although it reported the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission's results of the election, the paper concentrated instead on the need for a run-off and ZANU PF claims of widespread electoral irregularities suggesting that Tsvangirai's electoral victory was fraudulent.

According to the ZEC results, Tsvangirai won the election after amassing 1,195,562 votes, representing 47,9 percent of the valid votes, followed by Mugabe with 1,079,730, (or 43,2 percent of the total vote).

Independent candidates, Simba Makoni won 207 470 votes (8,3%) and Langton Towungana 14 503 (0,6%).
The Herald narrowly focused on the impending run-off, required by the country's Electoral Act in the event that no candidate receives a majority of the total number of valid votes cast. The paper made no effort to question the credibility of the results, which were released nearly five weeks after the vote, nor did it provide any form of rational analysis of Mugabe's defeat by nearly 116,000 votes. Instead, the paper diverted attention away from this evident embarrassment for the Mugabe by promoting to its front page a story celebrating how British Prime Minister Gordon Brown had been "humiliated" in that country's municipal elections.

The report, sourced from AFP and the BBC, was littered with editorial intrusions and tried to link Brown's loss to his alleged meddling in Zimbabwe. For example, while AFP and BBC cited Brown blaming his Labour Party's poor performance on the "global credit crunch", The Herald claimed Brown's "scapegoating of the economy was immediately dismissed by observers who said his preoccupation" with Zimbabwe and Iraq "had backfired".
The paper claimed people had phoned in saying "it was ironic" that Brown was "being humiliated in Britain at the same time his protégé, Tsvangirai, was being exposed by the presidential poll results in Harare, which showed he had failed to garner an outright majority . . . "

One of the alleged callers, an unnamed "analyst", claimed that Brown's loss was not only a "double tragedy for Tsvangirai" but would "rejuvenate ZANU PF's run-off campaign" because he no longer has "moral ground to comment on our elections here". But its main news story gave extensive space to Mugabe's chief election agent, Emmerson Mnangagwa, accusing the West, the MDC-T and civic organizations of rigging the Zimbabwe vote without providing a shred of evidence. It passively quoted Mnangagwa saying that the results did not "reflect the genuine expression of the will of the Zimbabwean people". He alleged "anomalies, malpractices, deflation and inflation of figures . . . multiple voting, people who are not on the voters roll being allowed to vote" and "persons on the voters' roll being turned away".

The Herald did not challenge Mnangagwa to provide statistical evidence to prove his claims, or ascertain whether the alleged irregularities were substantial enough to overturn Mugabe's defeat. Instead of questioning Mnangagwa's motives for attempting to discredit ZEC's allegedly meticulous verification exercise and SADC observers verdict of the election, the paper allowed Mnangagwa to accuse the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, of having "undertaken voter education without the authority of ZEC" and "outside the legal framework". He claimed ZESN voter educators "were not neutral . . . but party activists who masqueraded as voter educators to decampaign ZANU PF while extolling the virtues of MDC (Tsvangirai)".

Mnangagwa also accused the civic election watchdog of "bribing" and "compromising certain electoral officials" with money allegedly received from Britain and America, without providing any evidence for this either. Neither did the paper seek comment from ZEC and those it accused of manipulating the electoral process. Mnangagwa also blamed alleged Western sanctions against Zimbabwe for Mugabe's defeat, saying the sanctions "poisoned the electoral environment against ZANU PF". It drowned Tsvangirai's national election agent, Chris Mbanga's comments that his party "did not accept the final results" with Mnangagwa's remarks that Mugabe "accepts the results . . . " and "offers himself for a run off . . . "

In addition, it simply dismissed Mbanga's claims that his party was "denied the opportunity to verify the results".
The Herald's editorials were an extension of this distorted perception of the facts. For example, its comment rehashed tired conspiracy propaganda linking the opposition with the West and openly campaigned for Mugabe.
It argued that the run-off was "providential as it gives us all a chance to introspect and rectify our mistakes" and "send a clear message to these reactionaries (White House and Whitehall) that Zimbabwe will not allow the revolution to be stolen".

The paper's columnist, Nathaniel Manheru, was more vitriolic and derided losing presidential candidates, Makoni and Towungana for contesting the poll, which was "until now . . . a two-horse race". He described Makoni as a "mule" and Towungana "a scabby donkey -clearly fed up with carting maize to the grinding mill - decided on searching for a kinder, more ambitious fate".

Manheru attributed Tsvangirai's victory to, among other factors, the SADC-led talks between ZANU PF and the MDC, which he argued helped "design an environment hospitable to opposition rigging . . . which is why MDC-T almost walked away with naked heinous murder".

Fig 1 shows the sourcing patterns of The Herald.

Fig1: Voice distribution in The Herald

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