Trust in the sources that are used for information on public affairs
The exploration of trust the media sources that are mostly commonly used for news on politics and
public affairs shows that radio – and that would largely be ZBC radio – is very well trusted by ZANU‐PF
supporters. They are less trusting of TV, but then emerge on approximately the same level of trust of the
newspaper sources as their MDC‐T counterparts do. MDC‐Ts are substantially less trusting of their radio
news sources than those from ZANU‐PF, yet still show a reasonably high level of trust, namely 48%. The
undeclareds patterns of trust in the media that they use run closer to the MDC‐T levels than those of
ZANU‐PF (Table 25).
These trends indicate that supporters of a particular party, or the undeclareds, sometimes obviously for
lack of options, use information sources that are linked to the opposing political party. The sometimes
low levels of trust indicate that information will be filtered. Yet, it simultaneously means that there is
harder work involved to sift through the information received.
Table 21 illustrates the extent to which sources of news that are used by Zimbabweans are differentially
trusted by the supporters of ZANU‐PF and the MDC‐T and by the undeclareds. The widening range of
media sources that are available to Zimbabweans also mean that they are enabled to be more selective
in the coverage to which they expose themselves. A continuous lack of accessible alternative or
independent broadcasting stations nevertheless meant that ZANU‐PF continued to dominate the
airways in disseminating its take on political developments.
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