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 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 and will represent 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. – ZimOnline
14.6.2006
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Journalists set up media council
BULAWAYO - Zimbabwean journalists say they will set up a voluntary council to oversee ethics and standards of the media in five months time. Zimbabwe’s media is one of the most severely regulated in the world with an array of harsh state laws under which journalists can, for example, be