The president should concentrate less on what the media has to say, writes Anthony Holiday
In the ancient Greek myth the beautiful youth, Narcissus, stares fascinated at his image reflected in a deep pool of water, until he tumbles in and drowns.
It would, perhaps, be an exaggeration to allege that President Thabo Mbeki is quite the same case as Narcissus. But he is not far away from it either. Certainly he and his lieutenants give the impression that an obsession with the presidential image and the news media, which is apparently held to be responsible for the state that image is in, is obsessing the presidency to a point where it threatens to paralyse it.
The latest indication of this came last weekend when the president and the Minister in the Office of the President, Essop Pahad, took time out from other pressing duties to lead a high-powered government delegation that met the South African National Editors’ Forum in yet another “indaba”, aimed at improving relations between the government and the fourth estate.
The discussions took place behind closed doors and under conditions of strict confidentiality, making it impossible to form a fair judgement on the worth of the exercise.
There is, however, little reason to believe that this latest attempt by politicians and journalists to “find one another” will take matters much further. I am willing to bet that this latest set of exchanges did not differ substantively from those that have preceded it. On the government’s side, there will have been the same wearisome attempts to press the claims of a “national agenda” to promote “reconstruction”, the same charges of unprofessionalism, bias, cynicism and commercialism. The journalists will have responded with the usual defences of their right to freedom of expression.
Of course, there is a case to be made for keeping channels of communication between the government and media open. And no harm is done when each side lets the other know how it sees their relationship. But surely this does not require the personal attendance of the head of state and some of the most powerful members of his Cabinet. The Office of the President employs highly paid publicity advisers and communicators, such as the former editor of The Cape Times, Tony Heard, for the express purpose of tending its relations with journalists. Why could the meeting not have taken place at their level? Has he ceased to trust them?
The truth of the matter is that Mbeki has become fixated on his public image under the influence of a line of reasoning that is as understandable and compelling as it is flawed and simplistic. What he fears is not the effects his media image may have on his domestic constituency. Rather, he is afraid of the influence that image may have on foreign perceptions of his capacities and weaknesses and, hence, on the flow of foreign investment into South Africa. Without a fairly dramatic increase in such investment, the government cannot “deliver” on its promises to narrow the poverty gap, effectively combat crime, reform the educational system and generally give the populace at large a “better life”.
Mbeki thus sees himself as caught in a double bind. He cannot improve his global image unless the government keeps its promises. But it cannot keep those promises unless it improves his image. The president has opted to grasp the latter horn of the dilemma. He reasons that since foreign journalists and diplomatic observers derive their original perceptions about this country and its leadership from reportage and analysis that originates locally, South African journalists and their editors must by hook or by crook be brought into line with an overall nation-building project. Until this goal is achieved, he feels unable to act effectively.
But this reasoning is hopelessly inverted. It is not Mbeki’s image that restricts his field of action. It is his actions that are responsible for the state of his image. It was not the media’s portrayal of him that compelled him to take the stance he did on the causes of Aids. No newspaper editor forced him to adopt the lukewarm posture he did on Robert Mugabe’s land grabs in Zimbabwe. No columnist commanded him to absent himself from last week’s United Nations Aids summit. And no editorial writer persuaded him to adopt a centralist leadership style that, by its very nature, focuses all attention on him when decisions of national importance must be taken.
Mbeki has taken to complaining that news reports and commentary on such matters are defective because newsrooms are full of untrained and unprofessional journalists, and that managerialism and crude commercialism have come to take precedence over purely journalistic values. There are newspapers of which this is certainly true. But did our First Citizen protest when the government of which he was a member allowed a foreign press baron, notorious for his devotion to profit and techniques of stripping down enterprises he controlled, to buy up a sizeable section of the English-language press? Once again, Mbeki needs to look at his own actions and inactions before whining about the poor figure he cuts in news and comment columns.
None of this should be taken as implying that our news media are anything other than imperfect, staffed and controlled for the most part by woefully imperfect people. But, precisely for this reason, it does not have the necromantic powers the African National Congress appears to attribute to it. Mbeki should worry less about how it portrays him and concentrate more on making less of a hash of his job.
Dr Holiday teaches philosophy at the University of the Western Cape’s School of Government and at the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris