Unpacking Media-NGO Activism: CNN Or BBC Over The Zimbabwe Broadcasting

15 March 2010

By Reason Wafawarova

THE recent call for media objectivity and promotion of unity by President Mugabe has obviously been embraced positively by many, and we need to look at the current state of the media in Zimbabwe if we are going to make an informed follow up to the President’s call.

Zimbabwean media outlets in and outside the country have over the last 10 years been served by political activists masquerading as journalists and the structures that exist now are primarily authoritarian.

The media must disseminate information effectively and must be egalitarian.

However, we clearly have a para-media industry that has been infiltrated and littered by unschooled, untrained and rogue impostors who write and speak nothing but lies from a position of self-anointed authority.

You listen to Tererai Karimakwenda or Violet Gonda of the pirate SW Radio Africa and you can easily be forgiven for thinking that you are listening to authorities over the political affairs of Zimbabwe.

They play it so well that one wonders why Hollywood has not spotted such acting talent.

The media are not and cannot pretend to be a source of truth and accuracy of information as many of the journalists would want to portray. This writer is an opinion and analysis writer and that is all there is to it — opinion and analysis. It is a sense of false importance for any journalist or for this writer to expect people to treat their work as a source of truth and accuracy of information.

All that this writer does is point to people where they can get material that looks at the world the way this writer thinks it ought to be looked at — but the people have to decide whether or not that is accurate.

Ultimately, each reader has to rely on their own mind as the arbiter; they have to rely on their own common sense and intelligence, and they cannot rely on anyone else for the truth.

The smartest way of dealing with the media is to read everything; this writer’s work included — sceptically. In fact any honest editor or writer will try and make their credo so clear that their biases are not a secret to the readers.

This way a writer writing from the left such is this writer is, will have to be clear about his biases so that readers can compensate for gaps they need to fill out in their interpretation.

The repeated baseless assertion that President Mugabe is a "liberator-turned-dictator" is neither the truth nor accurate information. It is just an expression of bitterness by his defeated political rivals in politics, international relations, the media and the civil society.

Equally, the repeated assertion by this writer that the MDC-T and its leader are a bunch of quisling lapdog politicians is an analysis-based opinion and not a prescribed truth.

What this writer does is point out to materials where readers can prove that indeed the West treats the MDC-T and its leaders as their Trojan horses in the politics of Zimbabwe, and this is what this writer has done over the past five years of writing.

There is a lot of material out there to prove that there is a Western engineered regime change project in Zimbabwe, and that illegal unilateral economic sanctions are in place to realise the goal of this illicit regime change agenda.

It is that material that one needs to point the people to.

The ultimate decision about its meaning is theirs.

The media-reader relationship should be based on scepticism just like people must be sceptical about anything that comes their way from any sort of power system, and about everything else too.

People must be sceptical about what this writer writes. That must be the starting point. Why should they believe a word of it?

They have to figure out the truth all by themselves.

The role of a writer is that of an organiser. It is to help people to find their own answers. If they then choose the particular writer as source or a resource then that is up to them.

Readers have to be reminded that it is not what you read but how you read, and this is why this writer does not understand people who keep e-mailing "I do not read your Herald articles" before they go on to quote the very articles.

They think by denying association with the source of information they are expressing a sense of credibility, when all they are doing is proving blind anger and primitive intolerance.

This writer reads everything, The Changing Times, The Independent, the BBC, CNN, The Herald, The Zimbabwe Times, almost everything. The only reason I do not read zimdaily.com and zimbabwemetro.com anymore, for example, is that there is a clear difference between perfect madness and news writing.

What seems to be clear about these online rabid tabloids is that readership determines the manner of writing for a media outlet.

You cannot for example write baseless and cheap primitive lies in the Wall Street Journal because the people who read it are a sophisticated and moneyed lot.

However, any teenage idiot with nothing better to do can post a pack of lies on zimdaily.com or zimbabwemetro.com and the readers of these tabloids seem to have the appetite for as much lies as can be provided.

The cheerleading comments that you see there will define the kind of people you are dealing with.

This writer is part of a group of many researchers who alert him of political events in the US, in the UK, in Central America and everywhere else.

That is how one educates oneself politically. You need to be part of a group, and some friends fall out ideologically as you move on, but others come on board.

Many people believe that media outlets from the West are authentic and more reliable just because of their corporate size and their long history in the practice.

This is the kind of stuff that does not even rise to the level of idiocy — literally.

If people want to have a fraudulent reason for defending their gullibility, then that is fine, but there is no scientific basis for crediting the CNN or BBC over the ZBC, or Zimbabwe Broadcasting Holdings, as they call it these days.

The correspondents for all these media houses do the same thing.

They follow an outlined editorial policy, they choose what to report on and what to leave out, they work to be promoted up the ladder by fulfilling set organisational goals, they know no more than what we all know except that they have a privilege to get what they know published, and they think no better than any ordinary citizen but they have a platform to pretend they do.

Science has nothing more to tell about these media houses and the rankings they give themselves or they are given by other people, and there is no indication that science will ever do that.

What happens is that one media house can give you an attractive motto and statistical details as evidence, but that is the kind of stuff any sane 15-year-old can do, if they set their mind to it.

People in the media have in the past tried to draw conclusions from the progression of science, and this has been nothing more than a group of media practitioners with a political agenda finding some total charlatan in the sciences who will tell them, "This is the basis for it".

There is no scientific research at all, maybe just descriptive research, maybe therapy or psychotherapy — but that is about as far as one can go.

If people who claim they get something from psychotherapy do really get something out of it, it is not because there is any science behind it. There is no more science behind it than there is behind faith healing.

There is just no science behind the claim that someone gets healed because people sang and danced around him, although such healing has been proven to have occurred in churches and other ritual places.

Equally there is no science to prove that CNN, BBC or any other media out there tells the truth or provides accurate information, much as examples of truth and accurate information can be picked up for these or any other media outlet.

In fact, even real science does not even tell us the truth. Epidemiology is what they use in medicine to administer drugs on patients.

So, if you have a heart problem they do an epidemiological study on samples of controlled populations to see if one sample takes this drug another sample that drug, so which one lives longer and so on.

This is called science and one is free to call it that, but it is the kind of science that can be done by anyone who can basically count, or who knows something about keeping samples apart.

The point here is that people get misled by unnecessary sophistication that is designed to create a false sense of authority and that practice is the survival line of charlatans in the media and the civil society.

This is why these so-called opinion polls and reports from NGOs are always waved as authentic sources of information when in reality there is no scientific basis behind the compilation of these reports.

There is no scientific claim for this writer to be entitled to talk to others about world affairs, there is no qualification whatsoever — no more than any ordinary 15 year old boy has.

All that is happening is a collection of materials and data and referring people to these materials so that they may consider looking at the world the way this writer sees it.

The same applies to John Makumbe, Eldred Masunungure, Jonathan Moyo or any other commentators from the political science fraternity.

Their academic qualifications allow them to teach at university and to do any other jobs they may be hired to do, but they do not entitle them to have an opinion on behalf of anyone else, let alone on providing the truth.

Even Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Howard Zinn, Holly Sklar, Alex Cockburn, John Stockwell or John Pilger do not have that entitlement. No one does.

Politicians do tell us a lot about the electoral process. This is because for them this is a viable way of spending their energy, so they ultimately can achieve personal goals, Maslow’s self actualisation.

Practical day to day change in people’s lives will only happen if there are popular forces in motion in the society and not necessarily through the electoral process.

One can get things through the electoral process, but the electoral process is really only a surface phenomenon: a lot of other things need to happen in society for elections to be meaningful.

We hear a lot about the constitution-making process and how this is central to the coming of "democracy" and so on.

This writer’s view is that the new constitution could be fine if it will be used as an organising tool to try to get things moving. It is a waste of everybody’s time if it is taken seriously in itself, not as part of a larger popular struggle.

What people are focusing on right now is to get some words written down somewhere so that someone can get into some political office of one form or the other.

The focus must be to get people to understand the importance of these words and the need to keep fighting for them so that they use the same words to protect themselves from political tyranny, not for politicians to use them to enrich themselves or to protect their positions of power.

As Noam Chomsky says in his book, "Understanding Power", anyone who says "I want to be President"; whoever is listening must "forget it" because they will not be "any different from George W. Bush".

The people are they key. For the media, politics and everything else — it is the people that must determine how the wheels are turning.

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer and can be contacted on Wafawarova@yahoo.co.uk or reason@ rwafawarova.com or visit www.rawafawarova.com

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