Moral exhibitionism has become a fashionable currency in Zimbabwe’s media ecosystem. TheNewsHawks trades heavily in it – deploying accusatory headlines, prosecutorial prose, and a tone that presumes verdict before evidence. It presents itself as a sentinel of probity, an incorruptible auditor of national life. But any institution that appoints itself prosecutor, judge, and jury must itself submit to examination. Scrutiny cannot be a one-way instrument.
For an outlet fixated on financial hygiene, TheNewsHawks has been conspicuously vague about its own genesis. Its sudden appearance as a fully resourced newsroom invites reasonable questions: who underwrote its establishment, and on what terms, before formal donor funding materialised? These are not idle speculations. They are precisely the lines of inquiry TheNewsHawks routinely applies to others. Transparency that flows only outward is not transparency; it is theatre.
Equally revealing is the organisation’s fluid moral geometry. Benefactors oscillate between allies, liabilities, and rehabilitated partners depending on the political or financial weather. In at least one case involving allegations uncomfortably close to financial crime, TheNewsHawks – despite intimate familiarity with the facts – opted for silence. The episode, widely discussed in professional circles, involved a hasty exit from the country, the abandonment of a partner to legal exposure, and a later re-entry facilitated through convenient elite networks. Investigative journalism thrives on such material – unless proximity dulls principle.
What TheNewsHawks chooses not to investigate is often more instructive than what it publishes. Extraordinary claims involving senior staff members – circulating openly in media, social, and religious spaces – remain untouched. When spectacular narratives are insulated from scrutiny because they are too close to home, fearlessness becomes an act rather than a practice.
More troubling are persistent industry whispers that certain senior figures operate less as journalists and more as information mercenaries – leaking sensitive information, then later positioning themselves to “resolve” the very crises they helped ignite. If untrue, this deserves a clear denial. If true, it crosses the line from ethical breach into something far more serious. Silence, in such contexts, is not neutral.
Then there is the curious elasticity of “exclusivity.” Articles first published elsewhere, later reappearing on TheNewsHawks’ platform branded as exclusives, raise serious questions of credibility, not semantics. Chronology is not optional in journalism. When timelines suggest prior publication by another outlet, followed by rebranding hours later, readers are owed an explanation. Exclusivity cannot be retrofitted; it must be earned.
This is a professional reckoning. TheNewsHawks cannot credibly police corruption while exempting itself from accountability. Journalism is not sanctified by posture, donor proximity, or rhetorical aggression. It is legitimised by consistency, disclosure, and the courage to interrogate one’s own conduct with the same rigour applied to others.
If no one is above scrutiny, that principle must begin at home. This, one suspects, is only the opening chapter.
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