Colin Jackson
THE nation’s broadcasting heritage can be summed up with the Broederbond’s cherished term, “consensus broadcasting” — which meant not challenging the regime.
The old SABC left no established editorial values, because they only formally accepted that the role of the public broadcasting service was to shine the torch of truth. A critical and independent broadcasting culture was not in the interests of their political masters and they ensured, by appointing to every leading position people with the same political loyalty as themselves, that the torch remained unlit.
And so the new SABC management has inherited a wasteland.
The new management has invested great energy in exploring alternative styles of management. It has stated its commitment to informing and educating the public in an unbiased way, and to achieving this through the agency of talented people. At the level of theory at least, a dramatically altered version is promised.
Yet it is now 18 months since the new beginning, and already one can discern that the new corporation, though having progressed far beyond what preceded it, is not going to emerge as the critical and resourceful broadcaster one had hoped for.
The basic functions of management are failing. The editorial quality of programmes is neglected, while the entire attention of the management is devoted to supervising the work of innumerable committees among the rank and file of the staff. Now, as before, there is no one to evaluate news material from an intelligent and independent perspective, and news programmes go on air with the topics of current interest and the people to interview derived from the newspapers. Translating existing opinions and information on to the air does not amount to journalistic investigation.
In such a huge staff, there are hardly any journalists and newswriters who can do more than cobble together other people’s news. Departmental and senior managers do not recognise professional competence. They assume that anybody is capable of doing anything, provided they undergo crash courses in one of the auditoriums.
The state of confusion and incompetence is so apparent that capable people avoid the SABC. Only recently I was asked to audition a candidate who turned out to be unusually able, had done a graduate course in political science in London and had written for an African political review. I knew after the first minute of the encounter that she would lose interest before she had completed her interviews. And so it turned out. Management, for its part, shelved her application, evidently finding her qualifications too formidable. This frightened reaction to qualified people we knew well in the days of the old SABC.
A returned exile, with a British degree, involved with the South African struggle and familiar with similar political issues in Europe and now in the publishing industry, described to me how she had first applied to the SABC and had been turned down. Laughing, she said: “They felt my accent was ‘colonial’. I think what they want is fake American.”
>From our own universities, the best graduates in literature and social sciences are not seeking out the SABC. Many of those who have attended interviews say the new management is perpetuating the low level of ability of the old SABC.
It is not only daily running that is not working. Senior management has no clear concept of what acting in the public interest means for the corporation. Although there has been a laudable attempt to be fair to the different political parties to fulfil the declared obligation of being “unbiased”, it should be obvious that quoting different political parties equally is not enough.
The public interest requires active investigation and description of interest groups, political or financial. With penetrating inquiry, reporters could expose the consequences of policies and the weaknesses in arguments, instead of merely transmitting them. That would be in the public interest.
There is, for example, complete absence of debate about the SABC’s nearly unrestrained freedom of advertising.
Mere declarations by the highest management — in codes of conduct and the like — that the SABC serves the public do not constitute a safeguard against the intrusion of competing interests. Neither do they provide the SABC leadership with vision to see what the public interest is. We need more than an assurance that the SABC leadership intends to serve the public interest.
In Germany there is a strict constitutional mechanism prescribing how the heads of the state-broadcasting bodies are selected, so that they represent a management of expertise dedicated to the public interest. The head is there to provide cultural and editorial leadership. The SABC should be identifying a similar objective; whether it achieves this through constitutional or other mechanisms is another question.
Those of us who cared about broadcasting fought the leaders of the old SABC because they possessed and wasted a rare opportunity. The liberation struggle has shown insight and vision in working for the modern and free political dispensation which we are now beginning to enjoy. It would be absurd if the new SABC also wasted its opportunity. But this is now happening, in a muddle of laborious manoeuvres devoted to affirmative action and bureaucratic restructuring of the SABC by majority vote.
Colin Jackson is principal announcer at Channel Africa, the SABC’s external broadcaster