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Daily Media Update 51
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
June 25, 2008

Summary
The two government dailies continued to abuse their captive market by projecting a one-sided perspective of the decision by MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai to withdraw from Friday's presidential election run-off against President Mugabe.

They used their news and opinion pages to pursue their disinformation campaign to discredit the opposition party's decision without any due regard to balance, fairness and accuracy.

This prostitution of even the most basic ethical journalistic conduct in the service of the ruling party is not a new phenomenon and also characterized the papers' coverage of the politically motivated violence in the country and the parties' campaign activities.

They carried four reports on election administration issues and 11 on campaign activities.

Administrative issues
The government dailies maintained their selective and distorted coverage of Tsvangirai's withdrawal from the presidential run-off, focusing exclusively on the point that the withdrawal is a legal "nullity" while censoring alternative opinion. This only found expression in the private and international media. The government papers' biased coverage manifested itself in the way they continued to censor Tsvangirai's reasons for his withdrawal. For example, the papers have still not reported those given by Tsvangirai on Sunday, including the reasons he provided in the letter to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission formally informing the authority of his withdrawal. The Herald and Chronicle only reported ZEC chairperson George Chiweshe and opposition party spokesman Nelson Chamisa as having confirmed that the letter was now with the commission.

Despite this however, the papers continued to echo official opinion that Tsvangirai "cannot pull out" of the run-off and dressed this up by selectively reporting an SW Radio Africa news story from Monday reporting a similar opinion given by "opposition-aligned" constitutional law expert Lovemore Madhuku. The papers reported the head of the National Constitutional Assembly civic lobby group saying Tsvangirai was bound by law to participate in the election and that his candidature for the run-off was strictly "not a voluntary exercise; you give your consent when you contest the first election (in March)". However, the papers deliberately omitted Madhuku's observation in the same report that "politically" Tsvangirai was "right" in withdrawing from the election, saying it was accurate to say that the current environment was not conducive for a free and fair poll, "but unfortunately ZANU PF would go by the legal interpretation".

The papers widely reported Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa reinforcing this point, reiterating his earlier claims that the law left no room for a withdrawal. They also unquestioningly amplified Chinamasa's contention that "conditions obtaining on the ground are conducive for the holding of free and fair elections", and helped him to try and spread the impression that the MDC was going ahead with its electoral preparations despite the party's withdrawal from the poll. For example, Chinamasa claimed that MDC youths were seen yesterday "distributing flyers in the capital urging the electorate to vote for Tsvangirai" while "some 400 people" were being trained as polling officers. The papers also quoted him saying ZANU PF had been "reliably informed Tsvangirai was carrying out his campaign work" at the Dutch Embassy where "he fled to alleging security concerns". Said Chinamasa: " . . . he has been moving freely in and out of the embassy to campaign and all this contradicts the allegations he made about his safety". The MDC was not given the right of reply.

The two dailies also censored news of a UN Security Council resolution condemning the ongoing political violence in the country, saying this rendered the Friday election invalid. The point was only mentioned in an editorial in The Herald, in the context of conspiracies dismissing the UN decision as uninformed and hypocritical. Instead, the papers' news coverage of the matter only highlighted how the world body had "blocked" attempts by Britain, the US and France to "declare" Tsvangirai president of Zimbabwe on the basis of the results of the March 29 elections. As a result, they ignored the implications of the UN's appeal to the authorities to respect the outcome of those elections in which Tsvangirai outpolled Mugabe. Again, this only appeared in the private and electronic media. The dailies denounced the alleged machinations by the three Western countries to install Tsvangirai "illegally" and gave the false impression that the UN had actually given Zimbabwe the go-ahead to conduct the run-off when, in fact, the opposite was true. It reported Zimbabwe's UN representative, Boniface Chidyausiku, saying that submissions by South Africa and Zimbabwe "convinced" the council that it "would be legally improper to halt the run-off and install Tsvangirai". None of this was substantiated. Otherwise, the remaining stories in the government press were hysterical editorials that poured scorn on the UN censure and Tsvangirai's decision to withdraw as well as his seeking sanctuary at the Dutch embassy. These included Morgan's run-off boycott a joke; MDC-T: An unmistakable stooge, and, Tsvangirai, save us the theatrics (The Herald)

Campaigns
The Herald and Chronicle continued to portray a normal election campaign environment ahead of Friday's run-off despite the MDC's boycott. In their 11 stories, seven reported favourably on ZANU PF, while the remaining four depicted the MDC as a violent party and a puppet of the West. As usual, the government dailies reserved the pride of their front-pages to publicising President Mugabe's campaigns whom they passively reported railing against the MDC and its alleged Western masters for plotting to effect "illegal" regime change in the country. There was no attempt to explain the logic of ZANU PF's campaign in the context of Tsvangirai's withdrawal, or Mugabe's defence of his government's plans to continue with the run-off on the basis that it was a legal requirement enshrined in the Constitution.

The papers studiously avoided linking regional leaders' condemnation of Zimbabwe's pre-election violence to Mugabe's criticism of "some African countries" that do "not appreciate the difficulties that Zimbabwe has gone through", pointedly noting that SADC was "there simply as a forum for the parties to operate in". The papers quoted him saying: " . . . those who seek to impose themselves on us and make idiotic noises would not bother us." The papers also showed no curiosity about Mugabe's sudden willingness to talk with the opposition despite his party's previous hard-line stance against the idea. They reported him telling two rallies in Mashonaland West that "we are open to talks", saying that "if the (opposition) have problems they can always bring them forward, and that is how we came up with amendments to AIPPA and POSA".

Although the government papers reported Mugabe as having "handed over" several pieces of farm equipment at the rallies as part of the "farm mechanisation programme", including "12 outstanding buses in the province", they did not query the timing of the donations. Neither did they give an informed assessment of ZANU PF's "empowerment programme magazine" whose content appeared to be a catalogue of attacks against Tsvangirai and his party rather than a guide on how the ruling party was going to empower the citizenry. The official papers' slavishly supine reputation remained unbroken in their coverage of threats by yet another senior defence forces officer, Air Vice Marshal Henry Muchena. The Herald reported him pledging to defend the country's "sovereignty and territorial integrity" against "those that fuel and sponsor . . . regime change . . . or purported restoration of normalcy under the guise of democracy, rule of law, respect for property rights and good governance". Reportedly, Muchena urged people to vote "wisely" for President Mugabe because he "carries the values and interests" of Zimbabwe.

Political violence
Today, the government papers did not record any incidents of politically motivated violence although news of state-sponsored violence against the opposition continued to filter in from the private and international media. The Herald and Chronicle restricted coverage of the topic to rehashing official denials that there was systematic violence against the opposition. For example, they quoted Foreign Affairs Minister Simbarashe Mumbengegwi alleging that the situation in the country was "extremely peaceful despite reports from certain Western media saying that Zimbabwe is tumultuous", adding that the MDC were responsible for any violence. The papers reinforced this by quoting Chidyausiku stating that Zimbabwe's UN mission had presented the Security Council with statistics indicating that the opposition was mostly behind the violence. They also passively quoted him reiterating ZANU PF's unsubstantiated claims that there have been "numerous cases of MDC-T supporters going around dressed in ZANU PF regalia beating up people".

Fig 1 shows the sourcing patterns in the government dailies.

Fig 1: Voice distribution in The Herald and Chronicle

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