What patrician journalism in South Africa needs is a heavy dose of impoliteness, argues Ronald Suresh Roberts
‘WHEREVER you find injustice, the proper form of politeness is attack,” wrote American activist T-Bone Slim early this century.
This view contradicts the cowering ethos that gripped media bosses under apartheid, and survives, even thrives, today.
”To publish and be damned is one thing. To publish and be closed is entirely another,” Natal Newspapers editor-in-chief Mostert van Schoor said recently of his role under apartheid, evidently confirming that closure by a repressive regime is a fate worse than hellfire itself.
For courageous co-optees such as these, the primary task of an apartheid newspaper was to keep itself in print, whatever compromises of truth this necessitated.
But, like beauty, the necessity for compromise is often in the beholder’s eye. The daredevil reporting of the post-1985 alternative press, the Freedom of Expression Institute told the truth commission, demonstrated that the restrictions were less rigid than was generally accepted.
Instead of fashioning battering rams to expand freedom’s space yesterday, the liberal press waved white flags of co- operation. Instead of supporting the courageous individuals whom sometimes they fortunately employed, media moguls like Stephen Mulholland – whose recent attempts at self-exculpation have left no fleshfold of assininity uncaressed – hung them out to dry.
What has not yet properly been addressed is the continuing effect of this legacy on the post-apartheid culture of public debate.
We know that, having whitewashed convicted fraudster Greg Blank in a recent book, former newsman Rex Gibson has attempted to do something similar for Times Media Limited (TML), authoring a submission so craven in its non-disclosure that at least one former editor has formally disassociated himself from it.
But more odd than Gibson’s self-serving authorship of such a submission is the new TML management’s acquiescence in it. This suggests, alarmingly, that as inherited media ownership changes through the boardroom- gymnastics of ”black empowerment”, history itself may be in the firing line, a casualty of a new and lucrative politeness-pact between the old moguls and the new.
If so, TML will have given ammunition to those who seek to discredit the necessary and overdue deracialisation of wealth in South Africa.
What is to be done? Instead of reviving the old insipidness, a new journalism might update the tradition of ”muckraking” which accompanied United States Progressive-era politics.
Muckrakers vigorously exposed the quasi- royalist antics of ”private sector potentates” in order to fuel legislative and social change. They provided the basis, in public debate, for the success of Roosevelt’s revolution – and pressured him, too, when he wavered.
But in South Africa, the inherited media still peddles varieties of trivia and misperception. No issue has more gripped media imagination than that of crime. It has even made latter-day (albeit failed) activists of the motor journalists guild.
Yet it is largely left to Deputy President Thabo Mbeki to focus attention on the role of private sector syndicates as important part-causes of the problem.
The private sector – in its splendid post- apartheid unsavouriness – can still rely on polite treatment from the media, despite the rapidly expanding role it is playing in reconstruction. Despite the widespread embrace of public/private co-operation, failures of reconstruction (for example, housing) are portrayed as failures of the government alone. Business gets participation without accountability: a media gift of Teflon robes.
While Irish-born columnist Alexander Cockburn proudly emblazoned his latest book with a reviewer’s description of it as ”down and dirty muckraking”, there remains an entire ethos of South African reading and writing, a legacy of the sheltered past, which flees the journalistic ”vicious attack” like leprosy.
Yet, as a Harvard law professor, Randall Kennedy, said recently: ”When you’re in an argument with a thug, there are more important things than civility.”
Apartheid’s thuggery ran a spectrum: from the lowbrow violence of Magnus Malan through the lucrative silkiness of the Randlords.
The latter end of the spectrum, the patrician thugs and their liberal press and parliamentary allies, are today’s sternest opponents of ”viciousness” in public debate.
They confuse genuine reconciliation, a painful process, with cheap rainbowism, a rhetorical one. For them, public debate is an elaborate minuet among friends, comprising differences of degree and emphasis only. It has been that way for so long.
Last December New York’s Nation magazine ran a cover story entitled ”Seduced by Civility: Political Manners and the Crisis of Democratic Values”. Its author, Benjamin DeMott, pointed out that the patrician insistence on politeness in public debate redirects attention from the illegitimacy of privilege, towards the alleged unworthiness of the unwashed: from top-dog immorality to alleged bottom-dog ill-mannerliness.
A similar mind-trick still grips the post- apartheid media.
It is a truism, in liberal media circles, that Johannesburg (Cape Town, wherever) is a ”small place”, the kind where the ambitious walk on tip-toe and never offend each other or each other’s friends. The gyrations of unfrankness and fear that this inspires could have kept satirist Jonathan Swift busy for decades.
Thankfully, as Minister of Communications Jay Naidoo’s office said recently, ”people other than those anointed by a certain circle of friends” are increasingly relevant in media life. Liberal discomfort with the new ”viciousness” of public debate is patrician hegemony squealing, but not yet dead.
Ronald Suresh Roberts is co-author of Reconciliation Through Truth: A Reckoning of Apartheid’s Criminal Governance and author of Clarence Thomas and the Tough Love Crowd: Counterfeit Heroes and Unhappy Truths