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Government media on a campaign to misrepresent political opponents
Extracted from Media Update 24/2008
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
August 24, 2008

MMPZ wishes to condemn the government media's flagrant flouting of basic journalistic standards in a campaign designed to disgrace MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, co-claimant to executive authority with President Mugabe in the on-going SADC-facilitated power-sharing talks.

Tsvangirai outpolled Mugabe in the March 29 presidential poll but fell short of the needed absolute majority to avoid a run-off. The opposition leader subsequently withdrew from the June 27 second-round poll following a state-sponsored retribution campaign against his supporters leaving Mugabe elected unopposed.

A prime example of this blatant abandonment of journalistic principles in the government media's quest to discredit Tsvangirai was illustrated by ZTV (18/8, 8pm) and The Herald (19/8). They falsely reported that some regional countries, notably Botswana, Tanzania and Zambia, had disowned Tsvangirai, accusing him of misinforming them about the political situation in Zimbabwe. Reportedly, this followed representations to the recent SADC summit by Mugabe and South African President Thabo Mbeki, the chief broker in the power-sharing talks.

The Herald, for example, reported the three countries as having expressed "embarrassment" for having "blindly supported Tsvangirai". It claimed that Nigeria had even sent a "high-profile emissary" to the SADC summit to "offer apologies" to Mugabe for the country's "uninformed position" on Zimbabwe during the last African Union Summit in Egypt. However, none of these countries were quoted confirming this. Neither did the paper seek comment from Tsvangirai, nor bother to explain exactly what it was that he had lied to them about. Only audiences of the international and private media had the privilege of learning that these were mere falsehoods.

SW Radio Africa (21/8), the Zimbabwe Independent (22/8) and The Standard (24/8) reported Botswana raising "concern" about the official media's "misleading" coverage, saying it had not changed its position on the political situation in the country as it still did not recognise Mugabe as the legitimate president of Zimbabwe. SW Radio Africa and The Standard quoted the Botswana government dismissing The Herald article as "nothing but a figment of the editor's imagination".

In addition, the Independent's Muckraker column noted that the official media censored statements by Zambia at the summit that the elections in Zimbabwe were "a serious blot on the culture of democracy in the region". It also questioned the plausibility of having all the three leaders from Botswana, Tanzania and Zambia use "exactly" the same words to express "embarrassment" at having "blindly supported Tsvangirai". It observed that this exposed the "danger of allowing a deceitful media to remain unreconstructed" and illustrated the "danger" of Tsvangirai "returning to the negotiating table to sign an agreement when the state media remains free to lie about him".

In another classical case of gross misreporting, The Herald (22/8) misled its audiences that the country's current world shattering inflation record, officially pegged at 11.2 million percent, was not "that bad".

"While the figures are unsustainably high", it argued, Zimbabwe's hyperinflation "is yet to claim number one spot in modern world history" since "history proves" that several European and South American countries had recovered from "far worse off situations before".

It then went on to give examples of nations that once held world inflation records, mostly Second World War-ravaged countries like Hungary, Greece and Germany. How Zimbabwe, well into the 21st century and not at war, fitted into this category remained unexplained.

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