State media slammed for biased news

vernment media at the time the activists were arrested and detained nearly five months ago is entirely false. The massive publicity given by these media at the time strongly suggested that the MDC and its members were guilty of mindless violence against innocent people. The failure by the government media to report the acquittal of the MDC activists not only constitutes a gross dereliction of professional journalistic standards, it is also a serious offence against natural justice for those wrongly detained and to all those who remain misinformed,” says the latest report by the Media Monitoring Project of Zimbabwe.
The wilful suppression of this news demonstrates the severely biased nature of these media and is compounded by the fact that the judge’s comments describing key elements of the prosecution’s evidence as “fictitious”, was also suppressed.
Only the private media reported the High Court judgment exposing this.
The government media’s suppression of this important ruling contrasted starkly to their hysterical coverage of the activists’ arrests, which sought to reinforce the official view of the opposition party as a terrorist organization.
During the week only the private media recorded the countrywide arrests and beatings in police custody of hundreds of National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) members and the raids on the organisation’s offices and the homes of its officials.
NCA chairman Lovemore Madhuku confirmed the incident, alleging that 170 of the arrested activists were “receiving treatment” at the Avenues Clinic “for injuries sustained whilst in police custody”.
According to Madhuku, “most of the (activists) could not walk for more than a few metres from the police station” upon their release and “just collapsed” outside the station.
This refusal by the government media to report such important events affirms their status as unreliable sources of information and reinforces calls for the repeal of the country’s suffocating media laws to facilitate the establishment of more credible media outlets. – MMPZ