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Report on ZBC's prime-time coverage of March & June 2008 elections in Zimbabwe
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
August 04, 2008

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Introduction

This report documents the performance of the national public broadcaster, ZBC, in the 2008 March and June national elections and reveals how its undisguised allegiance to the ruling party, ZANU PF, has resulted in the organization violating the country's election broadcasting laws with impunity and subverting its public mandate to provide fair and equitable coverage of election contestants.

Eight years after the Supreme Court of Zimbabwe declared the monopoly of the state owned Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation unconstitutional, the government has still not awarded an operating licence to any prospective private broadcaster.

As a result, ZBC continues to enjoy an illegal monopoly of the airwaves perpetuated by an abusive government that has benefited from unfettered access to the broadcaster for propaganda purposes. This situation directly conflicts with its public service mandate to provide fair and equitable coverage of all news and opinion at all times in its pursuit to promote the free flow of information in the public interest.

In an electoral context, public media are strictly mandated to provide non-partisan information about election contestants and to act as an information service with regard to electoral procedure; they should not favour one party or candidate over another.

In the two elections of March and June 2008, ZBC was blatantly biased in favour of ZANU PF, granting the ruling party a total of 210 hours and 39 minutes' airtime for its campaigns compared to its coverage of all the other political parties, which only received 16 hours and 44 minutes' airtime in the March election. In addition, most of this coverage portrayed the opposition in a negative light.

This overwhelming bias in favour of ZANU PF became even more extreme in the run-up to the June presidential election where all dissenting voices were silenced, including a ban on the coverage of all MDC campaigns on the national broadcaster. The few times that ZBC stations referred to the MDC, the party was a target of political vilification. The same stations unquestioningly promoted ZANU PF and its presidential candidate, Robert Mugabe.

The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, the body responsible for enforcing regulations on media coverage of elections, made no effort to force ZBC to redress this extreme bias and ignored the broadcaster's unprofessional conduct.

Voter education

The duty of a public broadcaster at election time is to provide the public with information that will allow the electorate to exercise their franchise effectively on the basis of their ability to make informed decisions. ZBC partially fulfilled this role in the March election campaign where all stations aired voter education advertisements from different stakeholders, among them the Zimbabwe Electoral Support Network, The Women's Trust, NASCOH and the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, reminding the electorate about the nature of the elections and how to vote.
During the March election campaign ZBC stations aired 524 voter education advertisements totaling 619 minutes' airtime, 171 (219 minutes) of which were ZEC advertisements.

To this extent at least, ZBC provided some form of an electoral education service. But many of these advertisements, including ZEC's, were generic in nature and provided little specific information that would have assisted voters. In addition, the public broadcaster devoted no time to producing its own programmes on voter education. And ZEC too, which holds the sole legal mandate and obligation to conduct voter education, only began airing its voter education advertisements on February 19, while ZESN for example, started advertising almost two weeks before, on February 6.

However the "progressive" era at ZBC was short-lived as ZEC forced the public broadcaster to stop airing ZESN advertisements on its stations. This development followed reports that ZEC had banned ZESN from airing advertisements [SW Radio 19/2]. The reports stated that ZEC had invoked electoral regulations from 2005 identifying it as the sole authority (apart from political parties) to conduct voter education. Although the regulations also invest ZEC with the authority to grant permission to other institutions to conduct voter education, its action in stifling ZESN's non-partisan education campaign reinforced concerns that ZEC's alignment to ZANU PF had clouded its judgment and compromised the supposedly independent body's autonomy.

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