The West’s Zimbabwe coverage

Western media struggled to report the whole story on the Zimbabwe elections [AFP]

This week on The Listening Post Richard Gizbert looks at coverage of the Zimbabwean election – it grabbed the international media’s attention but some Western channels struggled to tell the whole story.

And Iran 1953: the media campaign that was an integral part of the plot to topple the country’s democratically elected government.

Robert Mugabe has been described as ‘defying political gravity’, but the recent election in Zimbabwe threatened to bring him down to earth with a bump.

The international media queued up at the border to cover events, but most were left right there – standing on Beit Bridge, talking to those coming out of the beleaguered country but not able to gain access themselves.

In this week’s News Divide, we look at the tenacious undercover reporting and the tightly controlled government media in Zimbabwe.

The world’s first media coup launched by the CIA in 1953 put the Iranian monarchy in power

Caught  in the middle were the ordinary Zimbabweans, many without the resources to buy the televisions and newspapers that might offer objective news.

In part two we look back to 1953 and how the CIA launched the world’s first media coup in Iran.

Journalists and media owners were bribed to slander Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh with so called ‘grey propaganda’.

The coup poisoned the mood in Tehran and turned people against the government, a tactic the CIA was to replicate in future coup operations.

In this week’s Newsbytes Yahoo tries to make amends in China by helping jailed cyber dissidents, Cuban TV launches a new channel to show foreign content, a British tabloid is forced to apologise for putting words in the mouth of Italian footballer Marco Materazzi as he was headbutted by Zinedine Zidane and a Berlin newspaper probes the Stasi past of its employees.

Our internet video of the week:

This video keeps up to date with the US election. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are still slugging it out for the Democratic nomination. Here is a lighthearted musical take on their rivalry.

Watch part one of this episode of The Listening Post on YouTube

Watch part one of this episode of The Listening Post on YouTube

This episode of The Listening Post aired on Friday, April 11, 2008