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Daily Election Report - Issue 14
The Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe
July 28, 2013

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MDC-T painted in a bad light again…

ZBC continued to favour reporting on Zanu-PF’s rallies in its news stories, compared to its coverage of the other political parties. In what has become the norm, the national broadcaster’s television and radio stations gave nearly three hours of live coverage to Zanu-PF’s White City Stadium rally in Bulawayo. The national broadcaster has yet to grant such live coverage to any other political party.

In addition, the evening news bulletins of Spot FM and ZTV were again completely dominated by news of Zanu-PF’s rallies, devoting nine of their 14 campaign stories to Zanu-PF.

Such ongoing bias in favour of Zanu-PF illustrates ZBC’s contempt for Zimbabwe’s electoral laws that demand the media cover the contesting political parties equitably – not to mention fairly.

On Sunday a member of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, responsible for enforcing these laws, was reported saying that ZBC was complying with the electoral laws governing the media’s conduct during elections. However, the statistics in this report and those preceding it demonstrate that this is not true.

Notably, only Spot FM reported Zanu-PF’s presidential candidate, Robert Mugabe, castigating MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai for declaring his intention to break the law and announce the election results.

ZTV confined itself to reporting mainly on Mugabe’s promises to revive Bulawayo’s industrial heart and solve its water problems if re-elected. ZBC’s other party activity reports featured a variety of officials reiterating Zanu-PF’s rhetoric warning the electorate not to reverse the gains of independence.

Of the private radio stations, only Studio 7 carried one report each on Zanu-PF and the MDC-T’s party activities. ZiFM (one) and Star FM (three) only reported on Zanu-PF’s campaign.

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