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Weekly Media Update 2010-16
The Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe
Monday April 26th 2010 - Sunday May 2nd 2010
May 07, 2010

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Comment

The unwarranted prominence of recent publicity in the government-controlled media reporting on alleged tension between Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and his party's Secretary-General, Finance Minister Tendai Biti, exposes the skewed news values these media hold.

While it is important to report on such issues where they occur in any one of the parties to the coalition, they have assumed a greater importance in the government media than news about the unresolved disputes between the partners themselves, which threaten the welfare of the unity government. This was apparent in The Herald's report (4/5) of Tsvangirai's news conference held primarily to update the media, and the public, about the MDC-T's perception of the stalemate in negotiations over unresolved issues relating to the implementation of the Global Political Agreement.

Tsvangirai's report on these problems were completely censored in favour of reporting on his observations about the attempts to divide the MDC-T leaders, albeit under a headline to the paper's front-page lead story denying the rift.

While the paper did report Tsvangirai admitting he was "shocked by the energy and magnitude of the efforts to undermine our [the MDC-T] agenda," it resorted to reporting the alleged content of an interim report on earlier violence at the party's Harvest House headquarters "said to have been compiled by an official in Mr Tsvangirai's office . . . and leaked to The Herald," which the paper said, contained "a litany of allegations" against Mr Biti and MDC-T director general Toendepi Shonhe. The paper made no attempt to corroborate the authenticity of this report and its content, although it had the perfect opportunity to do so at Tsvangirai's press briefing.

Such unprofessional journalistic conduct exposes the real intention of The Herald at least, to give maximum publicity to problems evidently affecting the MDC-T and then embellish them with spurious uncorroborated evidence and the opinion of unnamed sources that help to exacerbate the evidence of tensions within the party.

While MMPZ would be concerned if accurate information about these problems plaguing the MDC-T were censored, Zimpapers' past record of censoring news of divisions within ZANU PF helps to illustrate the newspaper group's bias and its intention to use their dominance of the daily newspaper market to discredit the former opposition party. Giving precedence to the MDC's problems while censoring news of those affecting the government simply compounds the professional distortion of news emanating from these newspapers.

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