Steven Friedman
worm’s eye view
Freedom is of little use unless you know what to do with it. Good democrats are, no doubt, expected to react with righteous indignation to the police who misled journalists about a fake hijacking. This democrat finds that a little difficult.
Yes, police representatives who confirmed a leak when they knew the “hijacking” was a practice exercise may have been insensitive. Yes, Minister of Safety and Security Steve Tshwete and police National Commissioner Jackie Selebi were silly to suggest that media recruiting of sources in the police bordered on the unpatriotic. But, for at least two reasons, sympathy for the media “victims” may be out of place.
First, the hoax may have been an accident waiting to happen, an inevitable chastening for a media much of which has nothing to offer but an unthinking addiction to cheap thrills.
Since 1994 the media have been allowed to report anything they wish. With honourable exceptions, they have responded with a steady diet of crime and scandal.
There is nothing wrong with that in principle. It is important that the public knows about crime; exposing malfeasance is a core function of the free media. The problem in most cases here is an unwillingness and inability to report either in a way that helps public understanding.
Crime coverage usually offers much lurid detail and little attempt to explain the bigger picture. How many stories try to tell us if, and where, crime is rising or falling, or how the authorities are faring in combating it? Yes, the police have withheld crime figures. But since when did the media see official statistics as their only source?
Hardly any of the reports offer readers information that might help them understand the dangers they face and how best to try to avoid them. The result? The more crime reports the media carry, the less we know about crime.
While crime stories usually get the basic description right, corruption coverage is often based on untested information and riddled with unresearched hyperbole. And again, we are given no inkling whether things are improving or deteriorating.
Why does the media fixate on these stories? Because it’s easy. Collecting crime stories in a society such as ours hardly requires great ingenuity merely the capacity to write down what a police officer says. Corruption coverage, while parading as the outcome of exhaustive investigation, is often the result of the ability to write down the claims of members of the bureaucracy dissatisfied with other members.
Besides being easy, these stories fit the ancient media mythology of what readers or viewers or listeners “want to know”. Faced with an easy option that is also said to feed a presumed public appetite for gore and sensation, the media succumb without a struggle.
Since there is much that happens in this country that cannot be gleaned from security sources or aggrieved officials, there is much the mainstream does not tell. Explanation and real investigation the stories that tell us what is really happening are far too difficult for much of an industry whose skills have been gutted by short-sighted management for at least three decades.
Because much of the media remain hooked on heavy breathing, it has great need of police sources. Nor, given its desire to excite rather than enlighten, has it shown much desire to evaluate what its sources tell it: one newspaper came within a whisker of publishing a claim that the AWB had access to nuclear weapons a police source told its investigative reporter this in a bar! (It is not clear why the police withdrew crime statistics they could have written just about anything they liked into the handouts and most journalists would have slavishly reported them.)
Given this, events such as the hijack hoax become almost inevitable.
The second reason for failing to feel angry is the response of much of the media: an outraged self-righteousness out of all proportion to the event.
It is hardly new to note the propensity of many in the media to a narcissism that assumes the public shares their obsession with themselves and their colleagues. In a country in which immigrants’ rights are violated daily with barely a report in the media, portraying the embarrassment to which some hacks were subjected as an outrage is in poor taste.
Similarly, much of the fulmination that followed the incident simply assumed that the public needs no convincing of the usefulness and blamelessness of the media. Any civilised person, it was assumed, would side with the media, which therefore had no need to account for its own actions.
The evidence suggests otherwise. Just as the claim of the mainstream of the print media (that section in which news is the most important product) to “know what readers want” is belied by falling or stagnant circulation despite rising literacy, so surveys suggest that journalism is one of our least esteemed professions. Clearly, citizens are far less impressed with what the media are feeding them than most journalists would like to believe.
It would be easy to crow over the travails of much of a profession whose smug belief in its own rectitude produces growing public rejection. But it would also be dangerous.
In an important sense, the media bear a striking resemblance to another of our institutions, the judiciary.
In both cases, the institution is crucial to a free society. We need an independent Bench, just as we need free media.
But in both cases, the institution’s establishment tends to assume that this removes any need to win public credibility. Just as judges and many lawyers are used to assuming that any criticism of either can flow only from freedom’s enemies, so are most of those who lead the media. Where critics are believed to harbour some sympathy for the institution, they are asked to desist because criticism can only fuel those who wish freedom ill.
This fails to understand the degree to which most people will not take the value of a free media or independent judiciary for granted both must battle for credibility. Where critics point that out, they do not threaten the institution’s health they are essential to it.
This column has argued before that judges need to show more sensitivity to public concerns if they want to win respect for their independence. Similarly, journalists will fail to win support for a free media unless they do far more to convince the public that they are more concerned to serve it than themselves and that they are at least as willing to examine their own flaws as they expect public figures to be.
So both the free press and independent judiciary face powerful enemies. Sadly, most of them are journalists and judges.