Journalists selling the country for their daily bread

“The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell the country for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press. We are the tools and vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”

This was not said by a Zimbabwean journalist but by an American editor nearly ten years ago. Jonathan Moyo had just taken over at Information Minister and was firing editors left, right and centre. But with the country’s politicians trying to rebuild their country, one is bound to ask, has the media in Zimbabwe changed with the political change or they are still living in the early 2000s. Could they aptly fit the description above?

Here is what we wrote in April 2002.

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