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Weekly Media Review 2011-9
The Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe
Monday February 28th - Sunday March 06th 2011
March 11, 2011

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Anti-sanctions propaganda swamps state media

The Zanu PF-controlled official media gave saturation coverage this week to the party's anti-sanctions propaganda campaign that kicked off with a 'national' anti-sanctions rally hosted by President Mugabe on the outskirts of Harare's central business district.

The national broadcaster, ZBC, flooded its audiences with 225 stories on the topic, while the Zimpapers stable carried 41.

No attempt was made to provide any semblance of balance in any of this massive publicity, which these media used exclusively to romanticise ZANU PF as a people's party fighting to defend the country against the West's economic sabotage and to vilify the MDC-T as accomplices in the imposition of the sanctions.

For example, the official media attacked Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and his party for boycotting the anti-sanctions rally, portraying this as evidence that the MDC-T was unpatriotic, enjoyed the people's suffering and lacked commitment to the Global Political Agreement (ZBC all stations, 3/3, 8pm and official dailies, 3/3). Tsvangirai's explanation that he could not attend a "ZANU PF project" was buried in their main stories promoting the antisanctions campaign.

In addition, the official media continued to mislead their audiences about the origins of the targeted sanctions against President Mugabe and his close associates - imposed after widespread human rights abuses and alleged electoral fraud - by exclusively presenting them as vindictive Western retaliation against ZANU PF's land reforms.

Evidently under orders to amplify ZANU PF's propaganda, these media adopted a new mantra by incessantly referring to the West's "illegal sanctions" in their news reports, a term they used 319 times during this week alone: [ZBC, 242 times, and official papers 77] without explaining what this meant.

The anti-sanctions campaign also formed one of the major themes at Mugabe's inaugural birthday music gala at the National Sports Stadium. These events coincided with an upsurge in the use of politically intolerant language in the state media.

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