PRESIDENT Mugabe’s omission of a proposed Freedom of Information Bill from the legislative agenda of the Third Session of the Seventh Parliament of Zimbabwe confirmed fears among Zimbabweans that government is not committed to the genuine reform of Zimbabwe’s offensive media and information laws.
And instead of scrapping the notorious Access to Information and Protection of [...]

June 28th – July 4th 2010
REPORTS alleging that two senior government ministers, ZANU PF’s Didymus Mutasa and the MDC-T’s Co-Minister of Home Affairs, Theresa Makone, had intimidated the police in an effort to obtain the release of Mutasa’s son, Martin Mutasa, from custody, provided some spice in a week that was again dominated by the [...]

June 21st – 27th 2010
THE WEEK’S TOP STORIES
ADMINISTRATIVE chaos, which crippled the first week of the parliamentary constitutional select committee’s national consultation exercise, meant to gather the aspirations of Zimbabweans in the new constitution, took centre stage in all the media this week.
While the government media publicized COPAC’s administrative bungling, they censored cases of intimidation [...]

CONSPIRACY theories targeting Zimbabwe’s perceived Western detractors
intensified in the government media this week in the wake of a visit by the
Kimberley Process Certification Scheme monitor Abbey Chikane and renewed international criticism of President Mugabe.
The Brazil/Zimbabwe soccer match was, however, the most prominent story in  the state-run media (See Fig. 1). Although the government-controlled media paid [...]

MMPZ welcomes news this week that the Zimbabwe Media Commission has finally
moved to register six new independent newspapers, among them four dailies, which will
bring to an end the seven-year state-controlled Zimpapers’ monopoly of the daily print
media market.
For the first time since the banning of the country’s most popular paper, The Daily News
in 2003, Zimbabweans will [...]

May 10th –16th 2010
NEWS of disagreements within the new Zimbabwe Media Commission over the issue of resource persons for a “workshop” organized to facilitate the
registration of new media operators exposes the politically compromised nature of an organization that is supposed to be free of political influence and
bodes ill for the coalition government’s media reform agenda.
While [...]

April 26th 2010 – May 2nd 2010
COMMENT
THE unwarranted prominence of recent publicity in the government-controlled media reporting on alleged tension between Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and his party’s Secretary-General, Finance Minister Tendai Biti, exposes the
skewed news values these media hold.
While it is important to report on such issues where they occur in any one of the parties to [...]

ZIMBABWE’S 30th independence anniversary overshadowed all other topical  news in the government media, such as the endless power-sharing stalemate, constitutional reforms, the controversial mining of Chiadzwa’s diamonds, and ZANU PF’s black economic empowerment programme, which have all preoccupied Zimbabwe’s domestic media for the past three months.
The private media were not consumed by the independence euphoria [...]

April 5th- April 11th 2010
Police threaten journalists
THE authorities once again demonstrated their intolerance of a free media
seeking to fulfil their mandate as public watchdogs of government propriety
when they interrogated local journalists investigating reports of corrupt
activities by prominent individuals, including a government minister.
Rather than following up the findings of a special investigations committee set
up by Harare [...]

CONFUSION over the fate of the ZANU PF/MDC power-sharing talks and the visit by the controversial ANC Youth League chairman, Julius Malema, received widespread publicity in the media this week.
The government media, however, suffocated fresh controversies in the mining of Chiadzwa diamonds and increasing cases of rights violations against civic activists, MDC supporters and villagers.
State [...]