Press freedom in Zimbabwe: Effects of government entrenched policies on the media during COVID 19 lockdown

Freedom of the press is the corner stone of information dissemination, with the media seen as the hallmark of gathering and dishing out that information. The right to freedom of information and responsible journalism are fundamental to health, economic, social and human development across the globe, Zimbabwe included. However, those rights are handled and applied differently in each country. With the advent of the coronavirus pandemic ravaging the whole world, countries changed their media policies to implement restrictive measures that either curtailed access to information or enabled the media to project only what is positive to the authorities’ interests. Assumptions can be `made that in such an environment, press freedom is under siege through either subtle or more emphatic means of pressure mostly by authorities. Those that operate under state funding are seen with gatekeepers who suppress negative information against government. On the other hand, the private media experience stringent conditions that result to them failing to get the information that is even positive to government. Most governments that continue to control the press, approach to journalism as a tool of “propaganda†with the sole objective of fostering their objectives and suppressing dissent. Based on the known historic traditional roles and functions of the media and journalists, this article explores press freedom in Zimbabwe with great focus being made on the effects o f government entrenched policies on the media during COVID 19 lockdown. The study relies on interviews with journalists and is premised in a qualitative methodology in which the data collected from interviews based on a purposive non probability sampling is analysed through critical discourse analysis of their responses. Since the study deals with the experiences of journalists which is not quantifiable, qualitative methodology is the most appropriate. Findings based on the journalists interviewed show that majority of them, seven out of 12 were of the view that private media was totally under siege and their freedom to operate and move around was curtailed by the security agents, while access to information from the government sources on COVID 19 was a nightmare for them. It is also revealed that only the state media journalists were free to move around and access information easily from the government sources, while several private media journalists were either arrested, assaulted or harassed by the state security agents.