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Weekly Media Review - Issue 4
The Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe
Monday January 24th - Sunday January 30th 2011
February 03, 2011
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A national uprising
by the Egyptian people against their leader, President Hosni Mubarak,
attracted the attention of all the media at the weekend.
This historic
event followed a similar "peoples' revolt" in
Tunisia, which forced its president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, to
flee the country three weeks ago.
The political
unrest in North Africa comes at a time when the continent was still
gripped with another protracted political crisis in Ivory Coast
where incumbent president, Laurent Gbagbo, claiming electoral fraud,
refused to concede defeat to his political rival, Alassane Quattara,
who was pronounced the winner in that country's presidential
election last November.
According to
MMPZ's research, the government media carried 60 stories on
these political crises between January 1st and January 31st 2011.
Fifty-seven of them were biased, while three were neutral.
Although the
official media admitted that protests in North Africa were popular,
they gave the impression that the uprisings were exclusively a reflection
of Arab anger against Western-sponsored puppet regimes - rather
than the undemocratic and repressive nature of these regimes.
For example,
The Sunday Mail (30/1)'s editorial: People's power will
always triumph over puppet govts, trivialized these popular Arab
protests against authoritarian rule as an uprising against Western
imperialism. It gloated: "The Tunisian government's
pro-Western stance . . . could not save it from popular anger. The
puppet-master relationship has its serious limitations and, for
such client states, the moment of reckoning is always a heartbeat
away".
The government
media's bias was more evident in their coverage of the Ivory
Coast crisis, as they openly supported Gbagbo, while expressing
outright contempt for Quattara, whom they dismissed as being a puppet
of the West. These media all but ignored the fact that Quattara
enjoyed widely popular support, as reflected in the election whose
result was endorsed by that country's own electoral commission,
West Africa's regional bloc, ECOWAS, the UN and the West,
led by France.
Notably, the
government media's hostile treatment of Quattara appeared
to stem from their apparent dislike of candidates from opposition
camps, the same way they treat Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan
Tsvangirai and his party.
The Herald (26/1)'s
columnist Alexander Kanengoni equated Quattara to Tsvangirai, arguing:
" . . . As it is with the Ivory Coast, we also have our own
Alassane Quattara, people who are prepared to be used as proxies
to defend and further the interests of our former colonisers. We
have Morgan Tsvangirai and the MDC here".
Earlier, The
Herald (24/1) quoted ZANU PF Senator Guy Georgias accusing France
of creating a "political mess" in Ivory Coast and arguing
that the West no longer had any moral ground to "lecture us
on good governance". ZBC adopted the same stance. It likened
Gbagbo to Mugabe and viewed him as a victim of Western imperialist
machinations because of his principled stance against Western interference
in his country's affairs (ZTV, 20 & 27/1, 8pm).
While the official
media viewed Tsvangirai's observation that Zimbabwe could
experience similar political upheavals if government, especially
the ZANU PF side of it, continued to disrespect the peoples'
rights (ZTV, 20/1, 8pm & The Sunday Mail, 30/1), the private
media argued that such action was highly unlikely as Zimbabweans
allegedly lacked the capacity to do so (Radio
VoP & NewsDay, 2/2).
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