President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s State of the Nation Address (SONA), at the new Parliament Building in Mount Hampden, Harare, on 23 November 2022. According to NewsDay, this came after “someone” from Parliament reportedly deleted the names of its two reporters from the list of reporters accredited to cover the SONA, thereby effectively barring them from covering the presentation of the 2023 National Budget the next day. Media Sustainability/Professionalism Speaking during the 2022 Africa Journalism and Media Summit in Zimbabwe’s second-largest city of Bulawayo, MISA Zimbabwe Chairperson Golden Maunganidze noted that due to closures of media outlets and poor economic performances in most southern African countries, journalists’ salaries are quite low, and this has seen experienced media people leaving their jobs in search of better offers. This means staff in newsrooms have become younger and less experienced and this is evident in the content that is produced. If the content is not up to scratch, this means fewer people will pay for the news and this will mean poor remuneration for the journalists. Without condoning corruption, this untenable situation has contributed to spawning corruption in journalism – the scourge of the brown envelope, which is of increasing concern throughout the world. “The shrinkage in newsrooms ultimately leads to an information vacuum – and as we know, nature abhors a vacuum – this vacuum is often filled by misinformation and disinformation. “The cost of producing news is increasingly going up, while fewer people are willing to pay for news - thanks to the information surplus that has been brought by the internet,” said Maunganidze. The Catch-22 situation for media houses is that while there is a need for accurate, verified, and truthful information from reputable sources to counter misinformation and disinformation, there is a shrinking of newsrooms that should be on the forefront countering this scourge through accurate and verifiable information. The cost of producing news is increasingly going up, while fewer people are willing to pay for news – due to the information surplus that the internet has brought. These developments inform MISA Zimbabwe’s relentless push for affordable data prices under its #DataMustFall campaign. Lowering the price of accessing the internet will mean more people will have access to it and the trickledown effect is that more people will spend money on accessing news platforms. In Zimbabwe, the dual accreditation of journalists by the Zimbabwe Media Commission (annually) and Zimbabwe Electoral Commission whenever there are elections, eats into the meagre earnings of already struggling media companies. State of the Media Report 10