“Lightning ruled out in Chitungwiza blast”

This is a headline, which appeared in a local tabloid as a follow up on the mysterious blast that leveled a house and killed five people in Chitungwiza on Monday. Some shoddy journalism suggested that lightning might have caused the blast. Media houses capitalized on Zimbabwe’s information hunger pushing up their sales by giving half-baked stories. I noticed the competition among the media to carry the catchiest headline but as you read the stories they all pointed to the “lightning belief”. Zimbabwe is an information-starved society and this was illustrated by the rate at which this story was covered on social platforms like Facebook. Details continue to emerge from the investigations by the police. Maybe our journalists need to be on the ground to cover these investigations and close this information gap rather than rely on hearsay theories from misinformed sources.

This entry was posted on January 25th, 2013 at 3:07 pm by Lenard Kamwendo and is filed under Media, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.