The rooster has long been Robert Mugabe's party symbol and it perches proudly atop the Zanu-PF headquarters.

Public hearings for new broadcasters are being keenly watched by Zimbabweans desperate to be free of decades of the state broadcaster's tedium.

It's been a tough road for Zimbabwe's 11-month-old process of drawing up a new constitution.

Poor Zimbabweans are illegally investing in satellite dishes, to avoid watching endless propaganda released by the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation.

Hundreds of women converged on a stadium on the outskirts of Harare on Saturday to pray for peace ahead of the country's tense presidential run-off amid mounting political violence. Zimbabweans go to the polls on June 27 for a second-round presidential election between President Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai.

Zimbabwe's war veterans have launched fresh invasions of the country's few remaining white-owned farms as President Robert Mugabe appears to be falling back on the tested tactics of violence and raising racial tensions, in preparation for a run-off vote in the presidential election.

With only weeks to go before the Zimbabwean elections, there has been no let-up in the slanted coverage of the campaign by the country's public broadcaster, according to the independent Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe. It said that it noted with concern that the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation showed no sign of observing Zimbabwean law.

What is the voice of the media? The question was sparked by a recent complaint about a report on service delivery protests, as well as some elements of the current debate around the media. Dale McKinley, of the Anti-Privatisation Forum , wrote that a report entitled "The travelling protesters" was "one-sided, politically biased, factually incorrect and lazy".