The truth is not for consumption by those of a weak nervous disposition, otherwise people wouldn’t get paid to write it. That is not what journalism schools are there for, to train people to write it. The truth can be found anywhere else but in the news. Just as physicians live by the hypocritic oath so also journalism’s professional ethic enjoins them to avoid the truth like the plague. Just musing.
It is for this reason that anybody who reads the May edition of the New African magazine’s reporting of the March 11 civil disturbances in Zimbabwe should do so with extreme caution.
Running across the first two pages of the supplement is a three word banner headline “Zimbabwe The Truth” writ large and in bold typeface suggesting to the reader that what they are about to read in the next 73 pages is nothing but the truth about what is going on in a country so deep in political and economic turmoil. Two portrait pictures one of Mr Morgan Tsvangirai leader of the opposition party, Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), and the other of a female police officer both victims of the low keyed political conflict in the country. the one with a wounded scalp, the other with a scalded face, face each other across the page as if to accentuate the unbridgeable divide that separates the political parties they represent, the MDC and Zanu PF respectively.
The headline Ankomah pens for his intro to the supplement “When truth takes a holiday” immediately puts one on their guard never mind the assurances and protestations made about how this collection of stories is going to be different. The appellation ‘Sponsored Supplement’ that marks each of the 26 odd stories on Zimbabwe further reinforces the premonition that truth might be as absent from this collection as it is alleged to have been from the discredited reports by western media.
The reader becomes acutely aware that Baffour Ankomah, the magazine’s editor, was doing it for the money. What the reader has in front of him is not the simple truth but a ‘sponsored version of it’. The point Ankomah’s constructed truth tries to make, that western media has misrepresented the reality on the ground in Zimbabwe is itself much less convincing given the official sources he relies on.
A case in point is the interview with Mr Godwin Matanga the Deputy Police Commissioner whose rationalization of his charges' brutal assault on Mr Tsvangirai insults the reader’s intelligence. How a single man, unarmed, could possibly have attempted to overrun a whole police camp, ends up with a cracked scull without him inflicting a scratch on any policeman boggles the mind.
The truth probably lies in all that hasn’t been said or written about the Zimbabwean situation in general and the events of 11 March in particular. Is the truth so disquieting that no journalist dares write about it and no newspaper publish it?
One is reminded of John Pilger's remark that real truth is always subversive, that truth comes from the ground up, almost never from the top down.
How do Ankomah’s stories on Zimbabwe's disturbances of March 11 measure up to this standard of truthfulness?
By the Oracle
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