AS THEY say here in kontuthu ziyathunqa, the likes of uber-narcissist and pathological liar, Madzibaba Hornywell (Mr Me, Myself and I Fake Award Winning Non-Journalist a.k.a. The Cunning Double Agent) bayaphefumula ngenxeba (they are breathing through the wound) as the inimitable Daily News keeps setting the pace in local media.
What after the independent and credible Zimbabwe All Media and Products Survey (Zamps) for the first six months of 2022 recently confirmed what all media consumers have known for a decade, that the Daily News is the most influential and the only daily paper that is growing in our beloved teapot country.
According to this authoritative research, all of Zimbabwe’s other daily newspapers, without exception, once again registered significant declines in readership during this period — with the iconic Daily News the only one to again buck market trends. Remarkably, this outstanding accomplishment — which has translated into much-envied commercial sustainability that is as rare as hen’s teeth in the local media industry — is being achieved without any donor funding or the lucre of politically exposed persons.
This phenomenal success also makes it difficult to believe that the Daily News and its sister paper, the Daily News On Sunday only recently celebrated a stunning 10 years back in business, having been shut down unjustly by the government of the late former president Robert Mugabe in September 2003, for eight long years, for the crime of competently telling the Zim story like it is — without any fear or favour.
Salt Of The Earth
Without doubt, it’s these all-round exploits, against the odds — coupled with the newspaper’s credible, truthful and non-partisan reportage — which pain the likes of Madzibaba Hornywell (Mr Me, Myself and I Fake Award Winning Non-Journalist a.k.a. The Cunning Double Agent) and other journalistic nonenties, whose notoriously purchasable heads are firmly stuck up the behinds of conceited politicians. To this sorry lot a commercially successful and impartial newspaper like the Daily News, which does not do the bidding of politicians (as should be the norm with all self-respecting news outlets) is thus supposedly “captured” or a “regime enabler” — whatever these much-abused words mean now.
But as the unflappable jolly good Editor of the Daily News told VAR recently (affable as he is, he is also a wily veteran newspaperman with truckloads of street-smarts for a hack), the obsession with the title by the likes of Madzibaba Horny and others of his ilk, as seen in their daily discourse and textual analysis of its content on social media, is part of the reason why the newspaper continues to be a runaway success.
“We absolutely delight in the enthusiastic attention that we get every single day from all our readers on all our various platforms, which confirms that the Daily News is the only game in town with unparalleled traction, reach and talkability. May this long continue,” he said.
Journos Too Charitable
Notwithstanding these classy views of the jolly good Editor of the Daily News, the Video Assistant Referee still believes that local real journalists are too forgiving of twerps who are fouling things up in their industry.
Indeed, and as VAR has mentioned before, it is perplexing why Zimbabwean journalists don’t guard their profession more jealously from phony hacks like Madzibaba Hornywell (Mr Me, Myself and I Fake Award Winning Non-Journalist a.k.a. The Cunning Double Agent), like what their peers in other countries do. Only this week, the Ayatollah of Narcissism and Fibs, with some have-been hacks in tow, was savaging media representative bodies for doing their job.
One thought that VAR had was that perhaps these bodies “deserved” Horny’s unfair criticism — because they have indulged and tolerated this insufferable fool for many years as he has behaved like a crazed bull in a China shop in the industry. Given this, it is little wonder that he now feels entitled to rubbish everyone in the industry, and to cast aspersions on real journalists every single day of the week without consequences.
On this score, just as baffling is how the profession always gives a pass to its most compromised and inept members who love dissing their colleagues, notwithstanding the fact that they are the real scum of the earth — among them unemployable, failed editors. Vanonyanya kujaidza makudo neanokamhina. And as one Mavhure always says, muchasvinura.
Until next Friday, Azishe!