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Weekly Media Review 2011-2
The Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe
Monday January 10th - Sunday January 16th 2011
January 21, 2011

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Panel-beating the truth - and an 'intervening' tale

Journalists who ask dumb questions are likely to make dumb mistakes, one veteran journalist once observed. Local journalists could well take heed of this lesson following the misreporting of comments by Attorney-General Johannes Tomana that he would immediately appoint "a team of practicing lawyers to look into" a series of cables from US diplomats released by Wikileaks, a whistle-blower website, while addressing a Press conference in Harare on December 23rd 2010 (The Herald, 25/12/10).

The AG reportedly told journalists that the team, "comprising five law experts" would "soon establish whether there was any constitutional infringement" in the Wikileaks reports and government would "take action guided by the findings of that team".

But such was the failure by some media organisations to get the story right that they misrepresented Tomana's revelations that he would set up a "panel of experts" to mean he planned to "set up a commission of inquiry" to "investigate" the issue (The Herald and Chronicle, 12/1/11; Africa News, New Zimbabwe.com, 24 & 25/12/10).

Only the Zimbabwe Independent (14/1) and The Sunday Mail (16/1) got it right and clarified the different roles of a "commission of inquiry" and "a panel of experts". The Independent, for example, quoted Tomana refuting reports attributed to him in the official media saying that he would form a commission of inquiry, saying: "I do not have powers to appoint a commission or committee. If you look at the scenarios around the appointment of commissions, it must be of national importance and it is only the President who can appoint a commission. Our powers are vested in Section 76 of the constitution. I do not know where all this is coming from".

He was clearly referring to the incompetent reporting of those media talking about commissions of inquiry.

But it doesn't beat the deliberate suppression of the news in the state media that SADC's chief facilitator, President Jacob Zuma of South Africa, had "intervened" to put a stop to the headlong rush towards early elections this year. The Financial Gazette (6/01) reported Zuma's international relations adviser Lindiwe Zulu saying "there was a lot of work that needed to be done before the country could hold free and fair polls whose outcome would be acceptable to all the country's political parties, SADC and the AU".

"It is an intervention by the facilitator," she was quoted as saying. But you could only have guessed at this from The Sunday Mail's front-page lead story at the beginning of that week (2/01) about a sudden delay in fulfilling President Mugabe's desire to hold early elections. This story mysteriously referred to "intervening complications" being partly responsible for the delay but didn't explain what these were . . . . Now we know! Needless to say, ZBC didn't even give its audiences a hint about this important development. But that would have put a dent in all that election propaganda it has been airing . . .

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