The Mail & Guardian, like other local newspapers, cannot consider itself to be exempt from public analysis, but it is the critical self-consciousness of the new South African state, writes Colin Paisley
BRUCE COHEN certainly knows a lot about the problem of media control in this country. His article (Mail & Guardian, December 1 to 7) highlights the way in which ownership of the South African newspaper industry is impressively concentrated in the hands of three major companies: Independent, Naspers and Times Media Limited. Having revealed the existence of these monopolies on information in what is supposedly a public domain, Cohen makes the claim that the state must take care of it and leaves it at that. At least we’ve all been
It seems safe to predict that the government isn’t going to do anything with regard to this particular state of affairs. As Cohen points out in his article, the African National Congress has consistently supported the further development of these monopolies. Why it has done so is apparently not something he is prepared to pursue, although he does describe the ANC as having “conveniently shut up” when TML acquired its monopoly in one area of the country and as having “turned a blind eye” when Naspers carefully managed to retain its absolute control of the Afrikaans market.
It remains to be seen whether the ANC’s complicity in these affairs has ultimately been in its own interests — but an organisation structurally committed to centralisation and control might have been expected to behave in such a manner, especially if co-operation and sympathy are to be expected from the institutions in question.
It’s a novelty, nevertheless, to find a newspaper discussing the structure of the country as if it were a matter for public concern. If the M&G wants us to open our eyes to the system of wealth and power under which the South African domestic order operates, surely no institution can be exempt from analysis, least of all the M&G itself.
The issue of ownership in its own case is hardly sinister: The Guardian, a British newspaper, controls more than 50 percent of the shares and the rest fall alongside the names of nearly 200 people, all of whom clearly support the paper as a liberal cause.
It is precisely this political role, however, and not the people to whom it belongs, which makes the M&G significant, although it is probably worth noting that the overwhelming majority of its shares are held by people living outside South Africa.
The M&G can rightly claim to have 10 years of independent journalism behind it because, having been ideologically opposed to the system of apartheid, it functioned outside the Powers That Were in those years.
However, given its relation to the Powers That Are in the new era, the M&G is no more a politically independent journal than the ANC is a liberation movement. This is not to say that the M&G is putty in the ANC’s hands. That would not be in keeping with the structure of their relationship; it is very far indeed from being a mouthpiece of the government. Rather, as the number one newspaper in the nation, the M&G is the critical self-consciousness of our new South African state.
These facts are not something which should embarrass the M&G. It is a role that all the best newspapers play in modern representative democracies. Even so, a basic understanding of the implications involved in the position is in everyone’s interests.
The values of a newspaper are expressed not in the articles and information printed in a particular issue (although you will be able to pick up something of them there) but rather in the contextualisations and frameworks which it repeats week after week.
The question is whether Cohen’s article — with its brave assumption that it is the structure of institutions that is of social significance, not their rhetoric or colour of their members — is a blip of information, isolated and ineffectual, or whether it represents a new framework for permissible debate on the part of the M&G.