All Editors are political technicians, Charamba tells media conference

HARARE - President Robert Mugabe’s press secretary George Charamba says he was “hired by politicians to make them pretty”.

In a frank exchange with journalists at a UNESCO-organised workshop on ‘Building Bridges and Closing Gaps – An Editors’ Dialogue Towards Common Ground’, Charamba said politics “plays out throughout the media” and all editors were hired by "political publishers” to represent narrow interests.

Charamba said in Zimbabwe’s “highly-polarised environment”, the media has become “political”.

He said: “If truth be told, in our highly mediased world, politics plays throughout the media. This is why I am here as your Permanent Secretary [in the Ministry of Information and Publicity]. I was hired by politicians to make them pretty. I am politics’ technician. I need you often. I demand you.”

Charamba said like himself, editors were hired by “political publishers” to defend certain political positions.

He added: “In our highly politicised environment, the media is politics, raw politics, which is why you are here as little, imperfect shadows of bickering politicians.

“Like me, you have been hired by political publishers to become their technicians to either defend and deepen the status quo, or to challenge and change it. You need me, the only difference being that some need me alive while others need me in a coffin.”

Charamba, often accused of orchestrating state media bias against opposition parties, said polarisation of the media in Zimbabwe was not “imaginary” but a reality – and his ministry was taking steps to create an “inclusive” media industry helped by the formation of a power sharing government in February.

“UNESCO has put together this roundtable to deal with the problem of a polarised media. It is not an imaginary problem. It is real. Let us acknowledge it,” Charamba said at the workshop held at St Lucia Park in Harare on Tuesday.

He added: “We in the ministry have acknowledged it. In fact the thesis of a polarised media came from the ministry when all of you in the media were still wondering what it is that afflicted you.

“Your ministry has already rejected that polarisation by way of the media indaba we held in Kariba. This was our first tentative step towards rebuilding an inclusive media industry in the country.”

Interestingly, Charamba said, Zimbabwean editors “have not lost one another over professional questions, the fury has not been over training, remuneration, ethics, escalating input costs, distribution, advertisers, tax regime …

“The fury has been over who makes a better prince of power Robert Mugabe or Morgan Tsvangirai; over who makes a better party Zanu PF or MDC. Ladies and gentleman, you have been polarised by politics, not by journalism.

“You have been polarized by politics not because you are victims of politicians, but because you have become political yourselves.”

Charamba said the genesis of the polarisation in the media – with the privately-owned media throwing its lot with the opposition and the state-controlled media swinging behind President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu PF – was Zimbabwe’s land reform programme started in 2000 which attracted international condemnation.

“The phenomenon of pressman turned political activist hit our newsrooms about the same time of land reforms, itself another political milestone, not a journalistic one,” said Charamba.

He hit out at media bodies in Zimbabwe – many of which he insists have “nothing or little” to do with media interests.

“You guys have tended to be organised by money, never by promptings of your own minds,” he said. “The Voluntary Media Council will never come right until and unless it abolishes itself, to again found itself as a genuine media effort.

“It scares me stiff when violent opposition to the Media and Information Commission is cured by a poor recreation of the same MIC with greater powers implied by the aura constitutionalism. The raw message coming through the constitutional Zimbabwe Media Commission is that better be misgoverned by gods than by mere mortals.” - New Zimbabwe.com