Poor Journalists Vulnerable To Corrupt Leaders, Causing Dying Media In Zimbabwe

Documentary filmmaker, Hopewell Chin’ono, has said that Zimbabwe’s media industry is left with just a handful of quality journalists and that the industry is dying. In an opinion piece titled “Zimbabwe’s journalism disaster” Chin’ono identified poverty as one of the main reasons

He claimed that he saw the controversial local religious leader, Magaya, bribing some journalists while he was working on a documentary film about churches.

A struggling young man or woman working for state media will break the professional ethics code to carry on receiving that pay cheque, and so too will a poor journalist working for private media.

Poverty is a tough thing to live with especially in a country like Zimbabwe, it forces many to do anything to survive.

How can a 40-year-old journalist renting two rooms in Kuwadzana take on the likes of Mthuli Ncube and Emmerson Mnangagwa with the same confidence that Christiane Amanpour deploys when interviewing Donald Trump and many other world leaders?

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That is why our political leaders get angry when they are asked deep and meaningful questions on international television, they are used to mediocre journalism.

The types that asks, “…is there anything else you would like the nation to know your Excellency?

So it is in the best interests of the political, business and religious elites to keep journalists poor in order to control them.

I saw with my own eyes editors from both the state and private media receiving bribes from Walter Magaya at his offices when I was co-producing a documentary on Pentecostal churches for eNCA.

More: Nehanda Radio