Back to Index

This article participates on the following special index pages:

Media Credibility Index report - April - June 2013
The Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe
September 05, 2013

Download this document
- Word 97 version (263KB)
- Acrobat PDF version (243KB)
If you do not have the free Acrobat reader on your computer, download it from the Adobe website by clicking here

Summary of findings

The electronic media carried the most credible top news reports among the surveyed media in the period under review, achieving an overall credibility standing of 97 percent.

Zi FM, Studio 7 and The Standard carried the most trustworthy top news reports in the country among the surveyed media while The Sunday Mail, The Herald and ZTV contained the highest number of flawed top reports.

2.1 Overall media performance

For the purposes of relevance and easy reference, this research grouped the media outlets into three categories: electronic media, daily newspapers and weeklies. The classification was based on their genre and frequency.

The surveyed media collectively carried a total of 1 036 top stories in the three-month period under examination. Of these, 993 were credible while 43 were not.

The stories were on various topics such as politics and governance, social and business. Issues that hogged the limelight in the media were on the constitution making; electoral processes; increased political party activities, including the holding of primary elections, in preparation of this year’s harmonized elections; and the arrest of prominent Star FM Disc Jockey, Munya Mlimo, on kidnapping and murder charges.

The overall performance of each news organization is illustrated in Fig 2.

The Herald carried the highest number of unreliable front-page news stories (19) followed by ZTV, with 11. All of the top stories carried by Zi FM and The Standard in the three months period were dependable.

Collectively, the public (state-controlled) media contained the most undependable top news stories in the period.

Of the total 43 top news reports that lacked credibility carried in the 11 surveyed media in the three-month study, 34 (79%) of these appeared in the public media (ZTV, The Herald and The Sunday Mail).

The remaining nine (30%) were spread across the monitored eight private media outlets.

The private media outlet with the most number of unreliable front-page reports in the period under review was NewsDay (two reports).

Download this document
- Word 97 version (263KB)
- Acrobat PDF version (243KB)
If you do not have the free Acrobat reader on your computer, download it from the Adobe website by clicking here

Visit the MMPZ fact sheet

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP