Elections are still many months away, yet political jostling is well underway and media is already deeply implicated.
Factions are leaking information to journalists in what seems to be complex politicking over who will emerge as crown prince to Thabo Mbeki. There are menacing tensions among parties over SABC reporting in Kwazulu-Natal. Coverage in general reflects a growing political intensity.
But do you know if the coming poll will be about the politicians or the citizens, and what role media may play in this? And, a related issue, do you know that 11 million South Africans won’t vote unless media (and others) can change the status quo in voter registration?
So, looking past the current headlines, consider media’s performance on these two questions. The menu in the months ahead may offer you two distinctly different views about elections:
- The first possibility is the poll as a politicians’ show. You’ll be alerted to the political vendors in the marketplace. The names, faces and rhetoric of Thabo Mbeki, Patricia de Lille and others will feature in the coverage. (Note: you probably won’t see the kind of folk standing in the current California contest).
If you’re lucky, you may be exposed to something beyond the personalities – namely, the policy commodities that the party salesmen and women are hawking.
Some coverage may go further and independently analyse how the various parties promote their products and try to pump up the market.
All this is a classic-style of election coverage and it sure beats old apartheid-style propaganda. But it is also only a fraction of what the media could do.
- A different possibility for electoral coverage inverts this classic model so that the active agents are not the bodies in the beauty contest, but the broader interests of those called upon to adjudicate.
In this perspective you’re not seen as a passive consumer who may not even vote. The elections aren’t reduced to choices between pre-cooked political brands.
Instead, we’re all part of an agenda-setting public, and the poll, in this view, is a chance for ”the people” to set the pace. It’s a time when politicians are held accountable for their past performance — and on terms to be set by the citizenry. Party promises about the future are assessed against this background.
You can see how these two views on elections lead to different emphases in coverage. In the first, the news is about staged events and the voices of party campaigners; in the second, coverage publicises participation and what the people see as the popular issues.
So the difference is whether an election is portrayed as being primarily about politicians — or about ”the people”. And the impact of media on the poll can vary accordingly.
Typically, our record has leant towards the first approach. This assessment is substantiated by William Bird, head of a research NGO called the Media Monitoring Project (MMP).
Speaking to a group of editors last weekend, he reported that coverage of the 1999 elections had overplayed politicians’ events at the expense of issues.
His research showed a media focus on personalities, even though, of course, South Africa’s voting system is for parties and not for individuals.
In addition, 1999 saw very little media attention on how that year’s elections related to race and racism, children, gender, poverty and HIV-Aids. One might say there was a disconnect between actual coverage and the real social problems constituting the background of the ballot.
The one exception in the 1999 poll coverage according to Bird was crime. It was reported as an electoral issue because of the seriousness of the matter, and because it was easy news that was also pushed by opposition political parties.
Yet, according to Bird, even while this issue did feature, its reportage stayed at the level of slanging matches. There was little analysis of opposing claims.
Bird noted that the need to tackle gender disparities and race divisions were barely touched on, despite these being among the country’s most important social issues. Ironically, the two still influenced coverage — and with negative effects:
- The MMP’s research shows that only 9% of news sources in election coverage in 1999 were female. And when women politicians were covered, they were typically referred to in relation to male politicians.
- Although the media itself was in the spotlight in regard to transformation, reporting failed to question racial assumptions. As examples, Bird pointed to uncritical discourse on the ”Coloured vote” or the ”Indian vote”, as if South Africans would inevitably vote according to their historically-imposed divides.
While Bird acknowledged that there were instances of good coverage, his main point was the record could be a whole lot better.
So, will 2004 be different? My view is: the matter needs to be dealt with now. And it depends on whether media people start to recognise that their coverage is, at root, a result of how they respond to the question: Whose poll is it — the politicians’, or the peoples’?
Their answers to this will affect whether their coverage goes beyond personalities to encompass issues, and will shape how such issues are portrayed. And, in turn, the actual impact of media on the character of the elections will lean in one direction or another.
Unlike editors who can choose between two understandings of elections, the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) has a single mandate: make sure that elections belong to the people.
How the body does this was outlined to editors at the weekend by Mosotho Moepya, deputy chief electoral officer. He began by telling the group that between the 1994 and 1999 polls, voting levels fell by more than three million people. His nightmare is a continuing decline.
Like him, you too may also feel disturbed about the prospect of a once proudly-mobilised South Africa fading into a passive political consumer marketplace.
Moepya said the IEC is responding to the challenge by making voting as easy as possible. It will set up some 1500 new voting stations next year so that people don’t have to travel too far to vote. The Commission has also persuaded the Department of Home Affairs to issue free ID books. (In 1999, according to Moepya, about a million people couldn’t vote for lack of an ID book.)
These steps by the IEC could help raise voter turn-out and emphasise the role of the people in relation to the politicians. But Moepya’s speech disclosed other matters that could sabotage achieving this goal:
- Between three and six million voters have changed their address since the 1999 poll. Unless alerted about the need to re-register, they will be disenfranchised because they can only vote in the district in which they live.
- There are almost two million 18-19 year-olds who are newly qualified to vote — but only a handful have registered.
- Less than half the 20-29 year-olds took the trouble to sign up to vote in 1999, and Moepya estimates there are now four million in this bracket who need to be persuaded to register.
Toss in another million unregistered people between the ages of 30-39, and you are talking about four + two + four + one million = 11 million.
In short, the views of 40 percent of a potential electorate of 27 million won’t be expressed at the polls.
Undoubtedly, this bleak picture will improve. The IEC is planning a registration drive on the weekend of 8 and 9 November.
But there will still be millions who remain out of the loop because of expired or non-existent registration, apathy or cynicism. Not all the people, it seems, shall govern.
The message in all this is that media coverage can do two things to promote elections that are people-centred, as opposed to politician-centred.
- First, alert audiences to the importance of registering and voting. Especially young people, and not merely sounding the alarm just before the poll when it is too late.
- Second, ensure that the voices and issues of those outside the voting loop still get factored into the political agenda. Especially the concerns of young people. If they’re not registering or voting, we need to know why and what it means.
All of this requires that media becomes proactive in ”bringing in the people”.
And you, the media audience, have a role as well. You should be pushing your views onto to the electoral agenda — and helping to shape what media makes of our third democratic elections.
Guy Berger is head of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University and deputy chair of the South African National Editors Forum (Sanef). He was recently nominated for the World Technology Awards.