Zimbabwean journalists to set up voluntary media council

lists can, for example, be jailed for two years for practising without licence from the government or one year imprisonment for insulting President Robert Mugabe in their articles.

The Media Alliance of Zimbabwe (MAZ), grouping journalists and freedom of expression activists, has for the last three years pushed to create a voluntary media council to regulate the media and in the process rebut claims by the government that it had to impose tough laws to bring order to an industry that was disorganised and did not have any binding code of ethics or rules.

The MAZ is made up of the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists (ZUJ), the Media Institute of Southern Africa, the Media Monitoring Project of Zimbabwe and the National Association of Freelance Journalists.

ZUJ president Mathew Takaona told a meeting of civic leaders in Bulawayo at the weekend that the MAZ would convene a meeting of all stakeholders in about three weeks at which final input could be made before the voluntary media council is launched in October this year.

“The structure of the Zimbabwe Voluntary Media Council is coming up and in three weeks time, we will meet as stakeholders to put final touches to this whole project and by the end of October we expect the media council to be operational,” Takaona said.

The council will have a secretariat, reporting to a 12-member board of directors that will be chaired by a retired judge of the High Court.

According to Takaona, the council will have representatives from a variety of players among them publishers, the church, civic society, journalists and editors.

At present the government’s Media and Information Commission (MIC) is the only regulatory body for the media in Zimbabwe.

The MIC chaired by pro-Mugabe academic Tafataona Mahoso has been accused of bias against Zimbabwe’s small privately-owned Press, which it has decimated by forcing four privately-owned papers including the country’s largest circulating daily, the Daily News, to close down.

The MIC has also instigated the arrest of several journalists working for privately-owned papers accusing them of breaching provisions of the state’s Draconian Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act.
Information Minister Tichaona Jokonya has in the past said he will have no problems with journalists setting up their own regulatory body although he has indicated the MIC will not be abolished. – ZimOnline