Deception and falsehoods: A mantra for private media

private or public, is supposed to be an ethical tool for disseminating information to the people so that they make informed decisions. However, the practice on the ground is that the West, international and local private media are advancing their unethical self-centred self-interests.
The people’s gripe with the private media comes from their private media’s inconsistency, peddling of lies and advancing regime change opinions. People have no qualms with The Herald being a public paper, giving reports that protect the State or national interest.
The private Press wants to give an impression of being free of manipulation despite all their asymmetric reporting. Analysts’ observations have been that the local private Press has assumed the same characteristics of their masters. This is exhibited in their total lack of respect for the truth, inconsistency and over reliance on agenda setting and opinion manipulation.
In my opinion, Americans and Britons can easily walk away with the best liars of the millennium award, for attacking Iraq and Libya after claiming that they posed a threat to international security. Using media lies, they invaded Iraq and Libya resulting in the death of millions of people.
The private press lies about anything and everything. I remember the lie peddled by Lloyd Mudiwa in the Daily News about the death of a woman in Magunje. When the story was investigated and the true facts were established, the journalist had already skipped the country.
Mudiwa’s falsehoods were only meant to bolster the private media’s opinion-making agenda.
The private media, in their quest for asymmetric agenda setting, published a story falsely claiming a baby was born with deformations caused on the mother by Zanu-PF’s violent activities. There are many such falsehoods the private media has published as gospel truth.
The West showered President Mugabe with praises, accolades and degrees in his early rule. The British queen honoured our distinguished President and knighted him as a British gentleman.
After the land reform, which was necessitated initially by colonisation and lately by reneging on agreements made at Lancaster House, the same Mugabe turned into a villain over night.
They made attempts to invade and dislodged him using flimsy excuses such as the cholera outbreak of 2008. What did Mugabe do since the year 2000 to deserve such bad characterisation by the West? That is the golden question requiring a platinum answer from the rational.
People often hear them say Mugabe has misruled the country for 32 years. It is known that from 1980 to 2000, the Westerners have been salivating to honour our president and that represents a period of 20 years. Following their logic the misrule therefore is not 32 years old.
Our President, according to them, ruled excellently for 20 years during which time he received accolades. Therefore, their inconsistency is clear in their false claim that Mugabe has run down the country in the past 32 years of his misrule.
Read the private media, they never praise President Mugabe regardless of any good he does for the nation; that would be inimical to the purpose they were founded and are funded for. In some of their falsehoods, they come out guns blazing that our President is a dictator.
According to Oxford dictionary, a dictator is an unelected ruler with absolute power. A dictator does whatever he feels like without regard for others or the results. On the other side the same papers have celebrated concessions gained by Morgan Tsvangirai or his party from the same “dictator”.
Yet in others they celebrate the victories that Tsvangirai and his party get when the “dictator” climbs down on previously strongly held positions. Honestly such behaviour is not consistent with a person of dictatorial tendencies.
The other example is that of elections. For two years the President has been expressing his strong desire to hold elections immediately. Parties in the opposition and other civic groups vehemently opposed this resulting in the postponement of the same for more than two years now.
If these examples are not enough then the recent one on the draft constitution should be a killer on the dictator debate. To start with the President preferred a negotiated constitution based on the previously agreed Kariba draft. The opposition, their masters and the civic groups would have none of it.
He then agreed to go to the people and gather their views as a basis for the new constitution. An extensive outreach programme was done in the process gobbling millions of dollars. A cooked draft constitution culminated from this painful process. The President and his party, Zanu-PF, did not agree to the cooked draft as they felt it does not incorporate people’s views as gathered through the outreach programme.
They then proposed their amendments to the draft before it was sent to the next stage. The other parties would again have none of it. The President and his party still showed a lot of magnanimity by accepting a compromised position that would allow the taking of the national statistical report and the draft constitution to the all stakeholders’ conference. Again the private Press came out with screaming headlines that Tsvangirai and Mugabe agree on the constitution.
Furthermore, the same media that allege dictatorship rule and excessive media censorship carry critical stories about the rule of the President and cooked stories about his personal life and health, on a daily basis. Hardly a day passes without a headline story of Mugabe this and Mugabe that.
Basically these media houses do not want to accept that they are operating in a free environment where they are free to express themselves to the extent of attacking the highest office in the land on a daily basis.
However, despite their negative allegations, their daily stories portray a totally different story on the ground. How does a “dictator” have the capacity to negotiate, compromise, and sometimes completely abandon his position for the sake of progress, accommodating other people’s views?
Also sickening is the similarity of the private media and the Westerner’s double standards or lack of concern for those opposed to their values and line of thinking. The local media and aligned civic groups were conspicuous in their silence on the Locardia Karimatsenga and Tsvangirai saga. For them it does not matter if a dozen or a thousand people from the other camp suffer.
They do not make good news. What makes news is a Tsvangirai in bandages he got from injuries picked from interfering with the course of justice. It is not a surprise where they learnt such double standards as their masters are credited with inventing and perfecting the art for their selfish ends.
In imperial wars that the West sponsors the world over, innocent foreign lives are lost daily from drone attacks and from other covert and overt operations. They do not shed a tear for the innocent lives of women and children lost in these wars, preferring rather to call it collateral damage.
However, when they lose one of their own in similar circumstances, they cry the loudest. When enlightened men like our President accepts to be moved by their loss and asks them to also get moved by our similar losses as he did recently at the UN General Assembly, they cry foul. Why are these people so repugnant to simple logic and rational reasoning?
To them, a man who worked hard to make sure his people get free education, housing, water, health care and a share of their national wealth (oil) among other goodies, is worse off than a foreigner who engineered this man’s down fall and plunged his whole country into chaos and uncertain future, sowing seeds of hate among the people that resulted in them devising means of eliminating this unwanted intruder, culminating in his death. Our Shona idiom captures this well — kugocha kunoda kwaamai kwemwana kunodzima moto.
People also find the attempt at agenda setting by the local private Press nauseating. On numerous occasions before regional and continental meetings, they portray a picture of a Mugabe who is going to face some serious grilling.
These opinions are presented as fact, as if they are on the agendas. After the meetings they cry foul that the regional or continental bodies are too lenient with Mugabe.
They forget that their wishes were never these bodies’ positions to start with. Recently there was a story alleging that fear was gripping the country ahead of elections as Zanu-PF was positioning violence and intimidatory structures.
The structures included a defence college that was planned years ago and that will have key civilians and other nationals on its curricula.
It is apparent from the foregoing that their reporting encourages division and feeds on chaos rather than peace. It is therefore careless and unwanted. No wonder why they always trail responsible State Press in independent national readership surveys. Bring over this trash and our embers will burn.
Panganai Kahuni is a political socio economic commentator.