The government should see the newspaper as a flattering reflection on our democracy, writes Political Editor Drew Forrest
‘Why go to that right-wing rag?” was one government official’s response when told that I was moving to the Mail & Guardian. It was not untypical.
There is a quite general perception not only in ruling circles that the newspaper has drifted rightwards since its heyday in the late 1980s and that its deep editorial sympathies may even lie with the Democratic Alliance.
The hostility of African National Congress leaders, partly by osmosis from the presidency, has reached bizarre proportions.
When the M&G asked earlier this year whether President Thabo Mbeki was fit to rule, certain ANC leaders saw it as a significant echo of a speech by DA leader Tony Leon in Parliament days earlier. It is even suggested that editor Howard Barrell holds clandestine strategy meetings with DA leaders.
Presidential communications officers are loath to speak on the record to the M&G, and there appears to be a policy in some state departments of refusing to speak to the paper at all. Some ANC politicians have stooped to the practice, virtually unknown in other democracies, of suing the paper.
For anyone who knows Barrell, the DA conspiracy theory is ludicrously false. But the “rightward drift” charge is more plausible. The Democratic Party, and now the DA, has received some surprisingly sympathetic treatment in the M&G, particularly before the 1999 election.
There is nothing criminal in this as the official opposition the DA deserves intelligent coverage. But it is not by any stretch of the imagination a party of the left.
Coupled with this is what is construed as the paper’s consistently negative portrayal of the ANC government, a “racist” focus on corruption involving black politicans and officials, and a cruelly personal vendetta against Mbeki.
Much of the outrage in the ruling party comes from a sense of betrayal that a newspaper that once, at great risk, agitated for democratic change has now crossed to the enemy. It is curious that genuinely conservative publications like Die Burger, which once described the truth commission as “a scorpion under a stone”, attract almost no ANC attention.
The M&G’s perceived shift is largely an optical illusion. At its best, it has combined elements of a serious left-leaning publication like the New Statesman and the satirical hell-raiser, Private Eye.
In its world-view, and the mentality of the journalists who continue to work for it, the M&G has changed very little. It has always been an anti-establishment paper, rather than a party mouthpiece, and the leaders of the ANC are undeniably the country’s new political establishment.
It is this that makes it possible for the paper to carry a softish double-page interview with Leon, while editorialising in lavish praise of the South African Communist Party. Both, in the new South Africa, are political outsiders.
But the fact is that it spares no erring politician or political movement, regardless of where they stand on the spectrum. How does the charge of DA bias square with the M&G’s most influential political expos of the year, on the Peter Marais vote-rigging saga? The story has done serious damage to the unity of the DA in the Western Cape, and perhaps to its electoral prospects in a region it wants to use as a governance showpiece.
The “mainstream” media in South Africa operate for the most part in the same way, but the difference lies in the M&G’s tradition of journalistic extremism. It will run stories the mainstream papers will not touch, either because of the risk element or considerations of taste.
Democracies need at least one paper of this kind, because it gives the truth a better chance of making it into the open.
The approach has the defects of its qualities. The M&G can be spectacularly right, as it was over the shenanigans of former Central Energy Fund chairperson Keith Kunene. But the cult of dauntlessness can also lead to inaccuracy and excess hence the fact that the M&G faces more defamation suits than any other South African publication.
The other root of the paper’s unusual brand of risk-taking independence is its owner, The Guardian, and the Scott Trust, which insulates publications of the Guardian group from management interference. Assuming The Guardian retains a controlling stake for a good few years, the M&G may grow in importance as a standard-bearer of intrepid journalism in South Africa.
This is because any threat to media independence is unlikely to come from legislative change or informal repression la Zimbabwe. It will come more insidiously, through interventionist owners. As the case of Rupert Murdoch makes clear, this is a worldwide problem for the media.
Hence the M&G’s editorial concerns about overtures to possible partners, including certain black empowerment groups. These concerns are not racist. The crisp issue is the almost obsessive interest some empowerment bosses have in the media, and their strong links with the ruling party.
They are open to political pressures, which they may transmit to editors. But they may be more interested in advancing their own fortunes than those of the ANC, and this is just as much of a threat. An energetic political climber like Nail’s Saki Macozoma is unlikely to be a hands-off proprietor. Given the M&G’s precarious finances, what is the nature of his interest in the publication?
There is another area where the M&G may have a unique contribution to make as an aid to rebuilding a left-wing project in South Africa.
It would not mean indiscriminate opposition to government and the ANC, nor uncritical support for the unions and the SACP. There are left elements in the government’s programme, and many ANC members remain true to its proud traditions.
By the same token, the labour movement is far from infallible. A case in point was its knee-jerk resistance to the Igoli 2002 plan, designed to lift Johannesburg from bankruptcy.
In a small way, the M&G can help define a left agenda in a post-apartheid and post-communist age. Its starting point must be that there are no more simple verities, and nothing can be taken for granted.
SACP secretary general Jeremy Cronin used the term “socialism” half a dozen times in a recent article in the M&G, without defining it. One assumes he does not mean Tony Blair’s “Third Way”. But can he possibly mean the fabled worker state, raised on the ruins of private property?
The M&G faces its toughest challenge since it started as a semi-samizdat news-sheet 16 years ago. The whole newspaper industry is groaning under adverse market conditions, and some well-known publications look close to the brink. The losses the M&G sustained last year cannot continue indefinitely.
To survive, it must get better. It must bash less, sloganeer less, and explain more. It must hold a more intense focus on the issues of the day.
The government and the ANC must appreciate that it is not a respectable mainstream paper and will lose its raison d’tre if it tries to become one. It must observe the standard canons of accuracy and fairness, in the sense of getting all versions of the story and giving the right of reply. But it cannot be so fair as to lose its sense of outrage and slide into mealy-mouthed neutrality.
The government’s refusal to talk to the paper is silly and self-defeating it makes no sense to accuse it of bias and then stonewall it when approached for comment or information. It breaches a basic political groundrule: engage your critics.
Politicians, like Minister in the Office of the President Essop Pahad, who see the media as an adjunct of the government information service, are probably a lost cause.
But the true democrats in the ANC and there are many of them, including Cabinet ministers should be helping the M&G get its facts and perspectives straight. They should see the paper as a flattering reflection on, and institution of, South Africa’s democracy.