Concealing the police state

bert Mugabe himself.
Mugabe’s threat that the “army was ready to pull the trigger” to quell protests – made during his Defence Forces’ Day speech evidently sounded a shade too awful even for the state media.
The threat was carried only by the electronic private media, the Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ) said in its report covering August 14-20. The state’s Spot FM, for example, merely reported Mugabe as warning opponents of the regime that the defence forces “are willing and ready to defend the country’s sovereignty.”
The privately owned media featured nine stories on new cases of rights violations, including the continued harassment by police and youths searching members of the public for currency under the Reserve Bank’s policy of cutting three zeroes off Zimbabwe dollar notes and replacing them with new ones, the so-called Project Sunrise.
The private radio stations, Studio 7 and SW Radio Africa, also reported that as well as beating up and carrying out degrading searches on regular members of the public, the secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, Wellington Chibebe, was assaulted by police at a road block when he questioned the legality of the searches.
The Herald turned this incident on its head by saying that Chibebe assaulted the police. Chibebe’s lawyer, Alec Muchadehama, said that what happened was that a policeman at the road block recognised Chibebe. The police spokesman Wayne Bvudzijena, realising it was a potentially damaging incident, then told the police to claim that Chibebe had assaulted them.
On the economic front, ZBH and ZTV bombarded audiences with Mugabe rhetoric about the currency reforms being some kind of panacea to the crisis.
“Almost all their reports on government’s strategies to resuscitate the economy were either based on the authorities’ self-evaluation of their plans or passive amplifications of the policy statements,” said MMPZ.
“The government press 30 stories on the Reserve Bank’s monetary reforms were equally unquestioning. They almost simply allowed Mugabe to blame everyone outside of government for Zimbabwe4’s economic ills, and allowed him to claim his administration as having prescribed the right medicine for the country’s ailing economy,” said MMPZ.