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Weekly Media Update 2010 - 8
Monday March 1st - Sunday March 7th 2010
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
April 18, 2010

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Comment

ZMC must get to work on media reforms

MMPZ welcomes President Mugabe's remarks while addressing the media at Zimbabwe House last week that the Zimbabwe Media Commission (ZMC) should immediately start operating, as there was no reason for not doing so. The Standard (7/4) reported Mugabe as having said this in response to comments by Information Secretary George Charamba that it was "their understanding" that the ZMC commissioners "must be sworn in first before they can carry out their duties". The weekly viewed Mugabe's clarification that only commissioners for the Zimbabwe Human Right Commission (ZHRC) and the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) needed to be sworn in before they started working as "an open rebuke" to Charamba, whom it accused of having been at the forefront in "frustrating" the licencing of new players in the print media sector.

According to The Standard, the approval comes at a time when the ZMC secretariat, inherited from the discredited Tafataona Mahoso-led Media and Information Commission (MIC) had been "turning away publishers trying to apply for new licences".

MMPZ hopes that the President's go-ahead will finally clear the way for the ZMC to start fulfilling its constitutional mandate to approve new media products that will bring an end to Zimbabwe's information wasteland without any further delay.

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