Media Coverage of Gender and the Constitution-making Process

This 12-page report shares findings from Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe's (MMPZ) research to assess the mainstream media's role in giving space and visibility to women's concerns, voices, and participation in Zimbabwe's constitution-making process. It is intended as both a yardstick for measuring, and an advocacy tool for enhancing, the media's role in giving impetus to the gender equity principle in the constitution-making process for the full realisation of women's rights. According to the report, this study's findings reveal that women's concerns in the constitution-making exercise have so far not been comprehensively captured and clearly expressed by either the media or opinion leaders.
According to the report, in a major boost for the gender equality campaign, Zimbabwe's coalition government committed itself to ensuring "full citizenship (for women) and gender equality" in the on-going constitutional reform exercise that is informed by the desire for a "people-driven" constitution. The rewriting exercise therefore provides an important rallying point for women to consolidate gains and plug all legal inadequacies that perpetuate their discrimination. This media research covered a three-month period from November 2011 to January 2012. The country's mainstream media, both print and electronic, were sampled and monitored. The research findings are presented in two sections: the first section presents the results of the content analysis, while the second section deals with the voice codes.
Content Analysis Findings

• Gender loses out to politics in media constitutional debate: The reviewed media carried a total of 119 reports on the constitution-making process during the three-month study period. Gender specific content only featured in three (2%) of the reports. An overwhelming majority (71 reports/60%) of the stories reflected that politics dominated the media's coverage of the exercise. Administrative aspects of the rewriting effort were highlighted in 45 (38%) reports.
• Media coverage narrowed to political contestation in the constitutional-revision exercise: The most significant development during the period under review was the leakage of the "Copac national report" in the state media during the month of December. This sparked animated media debate on the “significant” elements of the "draft", its legitimacy, and representativeness of the ‘people’s views’ as expressed in the outreach process. It is most telling that in the ensuing debate, gender issues did not feature in the media and opinion leaders’ critique of the issues considered to be at stake. The debate revolved around the political parties’ views, mainly ZANU PF, on issues like executive powers, gay rights, land reform, citizenship, security sector, reforms, and the status of war veterans among other issues.
• Qualifying gender coverage: Analysis suggests that the media's limited stories on gender and constitutional advocacy barely scratched the surface. The three gender reports on the issues were either event-based, contained insufficient detail, or simply publicised an official statement.

According to the report, the study reveals that a gendered perspective is largely missing from the media's coverage of the constitution-making process.
Voices in the COnstituion Making Process

• Women's voices side-lined: this study’s findings reveal that women’s contributions to the constitution-making process continue to be marginalised, as the debate was overwhelmingly masculine. Female sources constituted only 17 (9%) of the 189 voices recorded in the period under review. The disparity was most pronounced in the private media, which only quoted female sources twice. For example, although the Constitutional Parliamentary Select Committee (Copac) charged with supervising the rewriting of Zimbabwe’s Constitution has a female spokesperson, Jessie Majome, the media exclusively relied on the male trio of Paul Mangwana (ZANU PF), Douglas Mwonzora (MDC-T), and Edward Mkhosi (MDC-N) for official comment on the exercise.
• “Who are the women?”: Although constitution making presents immense possibilities for women’s empowerment, the study findings show that the media completely ignored ordinary women in preference of their influential counterparts. The few female sources quoted exclusively tended to be activists, government officials, politicians, and to a limited extent war collaborators.
• Functions of sources: while male sources were quoted in a wide spectrum of roles, female sources only appeared in narrow roles. For example, male sources were heard in their diverse roles such as politician, government officials, traditional leaders, and professionals. However, female sources were only heard in restrictive roles, repetitively as government officials, and sparingly as war veterans, politicians, and activists.

According to the report, the success of Zimbabwean women’s fight for constitutional justice and legally enforceable rights depends on their participation in defining national processes like constitution making. The media play an indispensable role in giving voice and prominence to these ideas, thereby conferring status and legitimacy to these aspirations. The constitution-making exercise has clearly been a male-dominated exercise within and outside the Constitutional Parliamentary Select Committee, and this is a flaw a more gender-sensitive media should have exposed, and should have championed the rights of more than half of Zimbabwe’s population to have their voices more clearly heard. MMPZ therefore urges the media to:

• access more female voices as these were largely silenced in the media debate on constitution making;
• reflect women in the diversity of their roles as stakeholders, politicians, experts, professionals, ordinary people, activists, etc;
• broaden the discourse and analysis to include women's aspirations in the rewriting exercise to expose discrimination that may still exist in the constitutional draft; and
• implement recommendations by previous and current research on gender-sensitive reporting, in line with regionally and internationally recognised gender instruments, such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Protocol on Gender and Development and Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women.