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and we just report the world as we see it or as it is”.
Any professional or cub journalist will make such a bold proclamation or hold on to such a slogan like “We tell it like it is”.
Surely all journalists will react adversely to sociological sentiments such as news is made by journalists or what journalists decide to be news becomes news or more still assertions that when nations ,communities and governments fail to deliver, journalists are part and parcel of that and are largely to blame.
This blame comes from the fact that if the media as the torch bearers of society can show the light then people can have the way.
Even those who claim to adhere to Jeffersonian ideals of the press and democracy in curbing societal abuses are also guilty of the charge.
This is so due to the fact that governments, communities, personalities and nations have been made and destroyed by the media, no wonder why the late Minister of Information and Publicity and national hero, Ambassador Tichaona Jokonya once remarked that the media are being used as a weapon of mass destruction and character assassination.
Since the media are central to the promotion of an enlightened citizenry, they perform an important function in mediating between people and events beyond their reach.
The pictures in people’s heads and the frames they use everyday to interpret the world are largely a result of what they were told previously and the cycle continues every day.
In this sense the media becomes central to people’s lives in that it can cultivate goodwill and mutual understanding, peace and other noble objectives if used properly.
The flipside of this is that it can be an instrument to perpetuate domination, racial discrimination, petty prejudice, alienation, anarchy and other undesirables.
Media thus conditions the way in which people think, feel and make sense of their world, know about “others” who in most cases are spoken on behalf of by the wielders of the ideological state apparatuses.
The media thus becomes crucial in maintaining the status quo and entrenching what is considered true and worth knowing.
This point was noted by American writer, Herbert Gans in 1974 writing about domestic news in the USA.
He observed that “News media can be viewed as communication channel which various interest groups and subcultures of American society attempt to fill with news that positively presents their viewpoints and of their opponents negatively, whatever successes, the best chance to influence the audience”.
What this only shows is that a people anywhere in the world should tell their story from their own perspective in order to create their preferred picture of themselves or how they want to be understood.
While it is true that Western media and the major global media powerhouses have readymade formats and stereotypical views on Africa and the Third World in general, the only news that their audiences are conditioned to is war, corruption, mismanagement, civil strife, disease and decay.
While these issues are found in the developing world, the question to ask is: Are they confined to the developing world only, what are the primary causes of these issues or are they the only issues that are worth reporting on?
This aspect is dealt with in book by Roger Wallis and Stanley Baran (1989) entitled The Known World of Broadcast News, whose front cover divides Africa into three regions worth reporting about.
The first part was Libya, with the focus on the Lockerbie bombing, the other part was the apartheid South Africa and the rest was depicted as “Starving Africa”.
While Sadc is a regional grouping made up of mostly former national liberation movements, do the peoples of these countries have an accurate perception of the other which is not a product of how each of their respective countries are reported about by the global news media?
Two trainee journalists from Harare Polytechnic who went to Namibia to attend the Pan African Union Debating Championships (PAUDC) at The University of Namibia from December 4 to 11, 2010 had a torrid time explaining about the situation in Zimbabwe.
They were asked very offensive questions such as “How did you make the journey to Namibia by road when we are told that in Zimbabwe there are roadblocks every kilometre?”
One of the trainee journalists Spanyonge Madziwa said: “Zimbabwean students were mobbed and were asked some of the most ridiculous questions that anyone can think of, students from Namibia, South Africa were even surprised that we could put on designer clothes, this made me uneasy and feel that I was a subject of ridicule.”
Madziwa said Zimbabwean students became more patriotic and become very good ambassadors of their country, as the weird questions that they were being asked were an attack on their personalities and ultimately on their country and everything they claimed to represent.
They saw for themselves gays and lesbians doing their immoral acts in the glare of the public with no sense of shame at all which revealed to them the extremist nature of unrestricted freedom and the much acclaimed right to sexual orientation.
The same homosexual elements vehemently objected to the hosting of the debating championships by Zimbabwe this year due to the strong anti gay stance by President Mugabe saying their rights to sexual orientation will be violated if they step into the country.
What can strike any observer of such events is how can the Zimbabwean story be told in Sadc?
And if Zimbabwe aims to be the leader in moral and intellectual leadership in the region, how then can its, heroism, anti neo liberal, emancipatory and empowerment ideals be best understood if not idolised in the region?
Surely this negative aspect needs to be corrected unless every Zimbabwean moving in Sadc countries should go around explaining everything like we have buses, we have piped water, we have computers to everyone they meet.
There must be a muchnuanced way in which the right perception should be created without which the country’s efforts will be trivialised and treated with contempt by the masses in Sadc.
It quickly came to my mind that the very idea of establishing The Southern Times was well thought, farfetched, if not prophetic.
This was the right platform to shape opinion and change the face of Sadc in a profound way.
Unfortunately the space of The Southern Times has been taken over by The Sunday Times which as most observers will agree, is on an onslaught to nullify any effort made by the government of Zimbabwe, to declare all these efforts as non events and thereby perpetuating the feeling of the helplessness on the part of the citizens of Southern Africa while legitimating the continued dominance of white colonial economic hegemony.
Whatever reasons can be proffered for the gradual disappearance of The Southern Times, such as viability problems cannot outweigh the need to create goodwill for Zimbabwe which will transform the lives of many people in the rest of Southern Africa especially in South Africa and Namibia.
The government of Zimbabwe must be prepared to pour money in The Southern Times project and there is need for a re think on this issues as what took place at the debating championships can illustrate the potential dangers of a Sadc community with the populace having negative views about others which they are told by others outside the region.
Certainly Zimbabwe must not let itself surrounded by people who least understand its point of view and whose support it cannot enlist.
Wellington Gadzikwa is a media lecturer and researcher based in Harare.