Mast Newspaper statement on Front Page
This morning we woke up to very disturbing news – a cloned front page of The Mast, with a headline – HH A “SATANIST” US INTELLIGENCE REPORT… “His attendance at the University of Birmingham Masonry Lodge 5628 could impede his run for the presidency, Zambians are deeply religious” being circulated on social media. With it is a letter allegedly written by Mr Hakainde Hichilema to the Editor-In-Chief of The Mast, proposing a buyout of US$30,000 for the story not to be published.
To the common man, this story did not run because The Mast was paid, which is all false and malicious.
We hereby urge the public to ignore that Satanic misinformation with the contempt it deserves. It is not our product.
We have never published such an article nor have we received such a report from any quarter.
And even the cloned headline does not conform to The Mast house-style.
It is clearly the work of schemers, mercenaries, merchants of evil and dark forces.
This does not come as a surprise to us at all. It is a well-calculated ploy – prelude – to facilitate the government’s plan to shut down the Internet ahead of these critical elections on the pretext of circulating misinformation and alarming statements.
This level of desperation is not only callous but dangerous. The purveyors of this Satanic agenda must canvass for votes in a clean way – win and lose elections with civility.
We urge these mercenaries, merchants of evil, to fight their battles and leave us out of their dirty agenda. We will never sell our souls, our editorial independence and professionalism, for pieces of silver.
The purveyors of hate speech and disinformation must find another forum and not our medium to carry out their dirty propaganda.
We ask the charlatans to clone their own media, not The Mast.
As Jose Marti once said, “A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a man who lives from a scoundrel’s work and is on the road to being a scoundrel…To busy oneself with what is futile when one can do something useful, to attend to what is simple when one has the mettle to attempt what is difficult, is to strip talent of its dignity…Liberty is the right of every man to be honest, to think and to speak without hypocrisy.”
Larry Moonze
Managing Editor
