It is true that the media landscape and the public are remarkably different from that which existed under apartheid.
Then the media were characterised by racial exclusion — with a white presence and a structured black absence as the defining characteristic. Media targeted at and run by black people and politically left groupings operated on the fringe of an essentially white, conservative public sphere.
As the Mail & Guardian rightly suggested in its editorial “Media is not melanin-deficient” (January 24), currently “a large proportion of media assets is in black hands and the bulk of the English language newspapers are headed by people with a reasonable amount of melanin in their skin.”
A singular focus on race, however, obscures some of the more profound effects the transition has on the operation of media and, by implication, the workings of democracy.
The “triumph” of liberal democracy was partnered, after the demise of the Reconstruction and Development Programme in 1996, by a consensus among the best-known media groups in their editorial columns and news analysis shows with the African National Congress government that economic growth happens through the market, most notably through the pursuit of neo-liberal economic policies. (To quote the M&G: “South African media institutions are broadly supportive of government policies and initiatives.”)
The result is that race is “naturalised” through market means. In some cases black empowerment drives this naturalisation. Racial divisions and compartmentalisation of the media-consuming market remains intact, but these are no longer regulated by the state. The rationale is now purely market related.
So, for example, the SABC now targets its radio and television stations at “urban” (meaning black) or “the well-informed” (meaning mainly white). In addition its television stations are aimed at “language” groups. Language and culture thus become privatised.
At the same time, the intersection of race and market has other consequences in the political and economic sphere. It results in very curious alliances that defy easy racial classifications. For example, the ownership structures of the press, while continuing to be referred to as “white” and “black”, actually mask more complex interrelations between Afrikaners and newly-created black capital, or black capital and English capital. The new elite replaces or works alongside the old; less concerned with the advancement of black people as a class than with their individual prosperity.
A fine example of this kind of politics manifested publicly when Koos Bekker, managing director of M-Net, received the Business Times Lifetime Achievement Award. In a speech entitled “Who Are ‘Us’?”, concerned with forging a national identity to complement a robust capitalism, Bekker recalled all his closest business associates — in itself reflecting changes to the make-up of South African capital — and described the motley crew of executives — which includes former unionists and ANC activists as well as the new corporate bosses whom he would not been receptive to say a decade ago — as “in the inner circle; they are part of the concept of ‘us’ in my head”.
Media professor at the University of Natal Keyan Tomaselli, who did pioneering work on the links between apartheid and racial capitalism in the media in the 1980s, recently warned that the approach on media transformation adopted by the ANC and media bosses will neither reduce structural inequality nor provide a more diverse range of opinions. Empowerment, as currently defined, happens at the top levels only and the market drives content, and we know that the market is made up of all the inequalities of South African society.
To bolster his argument Tomaselli refers to several failed attempts to gain black readers by newspapers that have traditionally targeted a white readership. The values that have been espoused in these newspapers are not necessarily those of a specific population group — they have indeed increased coverage of black newsmakers. Instead, according to Tomaselli, they now reflect the politics of a specific social class: the middle class and its political ideology.
The profit motive marginalises peripheral communities in terms of news selection. Tomaselli warned that, irrespective of their colour, owners of capital, who have greater access to mainstream channels of communication, will use it to further their own class interests.
As a result of these developments we see the beginnings of what can be termed loosely a “non-racial” press whose black and white owners and managers (as well as editors and journalists) and the class and racial factions (including inside the government and the ANC) whose views and interests they represent or reflect, both have a stake in the way the narrow political transition is playing out. However, that may not seem as obvious at first, as these elites appear to engage in seemingly bitter and open contests over power.
But a closer look at such contests reveals more: the new and old elites now battle over the content and nature of liberal-democratic procedures, rather than the content of more substantive rights. For example, the debate that erupted around the Human Rights Commission’s inquiry into racism in the media becomes very much an elite dispute: presented by its main protagonists as a wider societal dispute, yet its terms are quite narrow and selective.
One of the consequences of the transition for the public sphere is that the poor are excluded, caricatured or stereotyped in such discourses and debates.
In the experience of community radio broadcaster and one-time SABC journalist Brett Davidson: “The way elite media frame major issues such as the growth, employment and redistribution strategy is very important. When I’ve been in Parliament for the Budget speech of the minister of finance, I’ve been struck by how journalists confront Trevor Manuel with constant questions about tax, capital gains, et cetera and never ask him about issues to do with the poor, and I wonder how much that constant interaction with elite journalists shapes his outlook.
“Clearly he must constantly be thinking of how to answer the tough questions posed to him about taxes and issues affecting middle and upper income earners, and he less often has to respond to challenges from journalists with other perspectives.”
The implications for debates such as that over macroeconomic policy formulation in South Africa now is that in a post-1994 public sphere, in particular within the media, macroeconomic policy is being fought over by (white and black) elites in abstract, remote terms using economic jargon and technical language within the mass media.
Such debate invariably takes place at a national level, within the confines of a Habermasian rational public sphere with clearly defined limits: that of the opinion and editorial pages of the mainstream news, business press and economic news programmes on television and radio. The larger context is the narrow political and economic transition for which the foundation was laid in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
It is in such contexts that poor people are left out and alienated from debates and discourses about matters that concern them.
Sean Jacobs is co-editor of Mediating Change: Mass Media, Culture and the Transition in South Africa (Kwela Books)