Zimbabwean Journalists Use New Media to Spur Pluralism

By Rachael Small

With the escalating economic and humanitarian crisis, recent creation of a unity government, and personal tragedies of new prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe has once again landed in the international news spotlight. In a country whose government effectually, if not nominally, controls traditional media outlets, there seems to be little hope for the populace to be informed of government corruption at the heart of the crises that have been tearing their country apart for decades. But in the age of the Internet and its networking powers available to journalists worldwide, the means of information sharing in Zimbabwe are rapidly changing and enabling a certain extent of pluralism in the country's media.

Issues such as the questionable use of government funds and brutal mistreatment of opposing voices, including the March 2008 beating of Tsvangirai, are still not open to discussion in the nation's newspapers, television, and radio, which are either owned or strictly controlled by the state. The Mirror Group, the most powerful media conglomerate in Zimbabwe run by the government Central Intelligence Organization, owns the country’s two major newspapers, The Herald and The Chronicle, as well as its only news agency, which provides stories to all media outlets. Using taxpayers’ money, their papers publish topics that favor President Robert Mugabe and his ZANU PF party, while ignoring those that might bring the current regime under scrutiny.

Until recently, the only access Zimbabweans had to alternative viewpoints was through radio, specifically Voice of America’s Studio 7 broadcast, controlled by the United States government. Although VOA provides a legitimately different stance from that of the hard line Zimbabwean media, its reporting is often brushed off as “westernized” and thus inaccurate.

Some native Zimbabwean journalists and editors, however, have been working since independence to create a free and ethical press for their country. The one independent newspaper that existed in post-colonial Zimbabwe was the Daily News. Through investigative journalism and a philosophy of free flow of information, its journalists uncovered government corruption that undermined Mugabe’s credibility. But due to a series of threats and bombings, the Daily News is now defunct and its editor in chief Geoffrey Nyarota has been living in political exile in the United States since 2003.

Today, Nyarota publishes The Zimbabwe Times, an online newspaper that focuses on events within his home country and of interest to its citizens and exiles. Contributors to the publication include Zimbabwean reporters who have escaped threats on their lives and were forced to flee abroad, as well as some brave souls still writing from within Zimbabwe’s borders. A similar online paper The Zimbabwean is run by Wilf Mbanga, former head of the Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe, the company that published Nyarota’s Daily News. With the help of over fifty Zimbabwean journalists in exile and in-country, Mbanga's publication seeks to “give a voice to these Zimbabweans [living in exile], who constitute some twenty-five percent of the total population.”

While empowering otherwise silenced reporters, these online newspapers also provide forums for readers to discuss what they have read in the articles. The potential of this space is multifold, allowing readers who may disagree to present their arguments, vent their frustrations, share other stories they’ve read, partake in increased fact checking, etc. Articles are no longer merely facts to swallow and assimilate, but have also become springboards for discussion and free thinking. There is however one critical caveat to this progress: online newspapers struggle with the difficult question of distribution. While traditional newspapers suffer from a dearth of resources for production and distribution, their online cousins are limited in their visibility by the question of Internet access.

According to Robert Ndlovu’s “Comprehensive ICT guide for Zimbabwe”, published in The Zimbabwe Times on March 23, 2009, “internet penetration is very low due to a number of issues” including cost and availability of network coverage. This means that, while many university students and more well off individuals are able to avail themselves of the information provided by their countrymen overseas, the majority of the population is still excluded from these news sources. In the end, papers such as The Zimbabwe Times and The Zimbabwean serve to inform foreign media and Zimbabweans living in exile on what’s going on in the country, and have yet to spread roots in the greater part of the country’s civil society.