Zimbabwe journalist urged to avoid hate speech

All journalist from Gweru today were gathered at The Village Lodge for a workshop organised by MISA Zimbabwe. This Lodge is situated five kilometres away from Gweru city center on the Harare road.

This workshop was meant to educate journalist to report positive about the “All Inclusive Government”, which consist of three main political parties from Zimbabw.

In the workshop journalist had to discuss about the hate speech that is perpetuated by our media houses, especially the public media. Journalist also looked at how hate speech is used by private media in undermining the ZANU PF effort to cooperate in the inclusive government.
It is important for media in Zimbabwe to be serious in capacity building by reporting in a positive manner that can instill the hope of ordinary peoples in Zimbabwe.

Media is very crucial and plays an important role in educating, informing and protecting the citizens rights.

Journalist who gather at The Village identified hate speech that both the public media and private media use that causes discord to our main political parties. Words such as terrorist, the self styled war veterans, imperialist puppets, political prostitution, military junta, octogenerian and so forth are some of the lexicon that carries with it negative connotation that our local media should avoid.

In capacity building the media should touch important issues that matters most to the community that they serve. Therefore there are important issues such as child abuse, poor health system, lack of garbage refusal collection, water shortage, scarcity of foreign currency in rural area and many others that media has to talk about.

Media apart from playing a watchdog role should function as the public sphere for discussion.

Citizens concern should be thrown to a debate forum and contributions from all society members should be captured and addressed. Our media in Zimbabwe are indicisive and do not open such a forum for discussion.

The problem of ignoring the public in favour of politicians and political parties has caused a lot of inaffectiveness of our media functions in informing the public. Ordinary citizens ned to be well informed about what is taking place. Currently our media in Zimbabwe despite the global political agreement the was reached by the three main political parties, hate speech, lies, unobjective and hate speech is rife.

Journalist from both state media and private media expressed their concern about certain issues that impede their role to inform the citizens. Despite the rule by the High Court of Zimbabwe that Media and Information Commission (MIC) of Zimbabwe is relevant to the Inclusive government, journalist especially from private media expressed their concern.

Journalist from Private media said that they were barred from reporting at the COMESA sumit because they did no register with MIC. This makes most journalist to believe that the global agreement regulations are not followed. Hence this could be one of reasons why hate speech is still rife.

Workshops to educate journalists to be modern are important in that it reminds that of what they are expected and required of doing for capacity building in an all inclusive government. At this moment they is need to give hope to the citizens and reporting on stories that meets their needs.