Y Abba Omar
Crossfire
Being a public servant and, more importantly, being part of the government’s communication system, it is only when I came across the words of James Fallows that I felt encouraged to write this piece.
Fallows wrote in Breaking the News: ”In response to suggestions that the press has failed to meet its public responsibilities, the first instinct of many journalists is to cry ‘First Amendment’, which is like the military’s reflexive use of ‘national security’ to rebut outside criticism of how it does its work.”
The South African media has, to date, routinely passed up opportunities to carry out some introspection about itself.
Scorn was poured upon those who dared to engage in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings on the media, while hysteria greeted the announcement by the Human Rights Commission that it would be examining racism in the media.
Is it not time that editors and journalists honestly examine the impact of media concentration on the way news is covered?
In South Africa, to quote Cape Argus editor Moegsien Williams, ”Journalists … are needed to act as leaders – serving communities, linking communities, creating new communities and serving democracy,” not to merely sensationalise the ills of our society but to show what can be and is being done to address these ills.
The notion that we should give the readers what they want sounds like a deeply democratic notion. However, Leo Bogart, another legend of American journalism, has asked: ”Is it the responsibility of the media to report only on what people are interested in? Or is there also a very important place for journalists, as the conscience of the public, to raise issues that people don’t know about but ought to get interested in?”
Producing a good cash flow has been at the expense of good reporting. Because radio, TV and the press can all access the wire services for copy, they no longer depend on an army of reporters. The shutting down of training facilities or reducing training budgets has thus been a natural course to take.
There is thus homogenisation of content and what is being referred to as ”dumbing down”, a kind of reducing news to the lowest common denominator.
To understand the superficiality of issues being covered is to see communication only being understood in terms of one dimension – breadth – whereas the additional dimension of depth – the meaning of what is communicated – is overlooked.
Ben Bagdikian, former head of Berkeley’s School of Journalism, emphasises that ”a public used to a narrow range of ideas will come to regard this narrowness as the only acceptable condition. The marketplace of ideas cannot be measured by its size and technological virtuosity. Blandness and noise do not constitute ideas and information.”
There is a dialectic between the problems of concentration of ownership and the monoculture of content: diverse ownership is necessary for the diversity of ideas.
The future of press freedom and the quality and nature of the South African media is in the hands of the practitioners. It is only the people in the media world who can answer the question whether South Africa has media which match the sophistication of its Constitution.
To cite Fallows, journalists must stop kidding themselves that they are objective scientists observing the behaviour of fruit flies but not influencing what they might do. The process of choosing the news is so ingrained that journalists may easily believe they are not taking decisions – when in fact they are.
Spare a thought for CzechPresident Vaclav Havel who said: ”I never fail to be astonished at how much I am at the mercy of television directors and editors, at how my public image depends far more on them than it does on myself.”
Forward to some navel-gazing!
Y Abba Omar is the deputy CEO of Government Communications. He wrote this in his personal capacity