STATE OF THE MEDIA IN ZAMBIA In an interview yesterday, Siwale said it was unfortunate that government was still following him around. “They are following me; writing letters everywhere. Yesterday (Thursday) they wrote a letter to Prime TV asking for footage for my speech. It‟s harassment [after being released from prison] because I cannot be arrested twice for the same offence. I cannot defame him (President Edgar Lungu) any further that is if he has a character that I can defame. A person who steals from the dead cannot have a character that can be defamed,” Siwale said. But when contacted for a comment, Shawa wondered why Prime TV had been picked to release Siwale‟s footage. Concerns by the Parliamentary Committee on Media, Information and Communication Technologies were raised stating that the new media had brought on board false and untraceable news disseminators who could not be held accountable for their misdeeds33. This concern according to the committee suggested that there was need to put in place laws that could regulate the media. “Challenges of media convergence include cyberspace crime, infringement of privacy and threats on information protection. In addition, the new media era had brought on board disseminators of news of unknown identities and no known fixed abode who could, therefore, not be held accountable for abrogating journalism tenets by anyone. In Zambia, the media landscape had been taken by storm by explosion in digital technology or new technologies. This had affected the way journalists gathered and disseminated information on one hand and how the public consumed information, on the other. The power to communicate on a mass scale no longer rested solely in the hands of the elite who had the capacity to establish and operate electronic and print media houses, which had previously been a natural barrier to participation by the general public. Currently, anyone with access to the internet could create and share or edit theirs or another 33 News Diggers - Untraceable news publishers worry parliamentary committee – 18th June, 2018 27