It’s not difficult to wax cynical about the decline of contemporary news media. Just try living in America for a while; see how you feel after months of daily exposure to the self-righteous flag waving that passes for ‘news and analysis’ on network newscasts and radio talk shows, or the patriotic, nutritionally bereft snippets that pass for articles in America’s best-selling ‘McPaper’, USA Today.
But there remains ample evidence, in the midst of all of the sensationalist clutter, that the fourth estate is alive and well and going about its business; at times even engendering a culture of inquiry and civic awareness.
Is this America we’re talking about? The same America that thought the Ba’ath Party was in cahoots with al Qaeda? The same America that believed George W. Bush toppled over and cracked his head after chugging a pretzel? Indeed. But also the same America that bred journalists like Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who cracked open the Watergate scandal that ultimately toppled a government.
I reported last month on the Federal Communication Commission’s decision to relax American media ownership restrictions, noting that the self-serving silence of a few large media organisations could not prevent a bipartisan public outcry in the wake of the FCC’s ruling.
As it transpired, that outcry reached all the way to Congress, with the House of Representatives voting overwhelmingly in July to retain the cap on television ownership, limiting any single company’s reach to 35 percent of the national audience. The ‘rollback’ bill remains subject to passage through the Senate, as well as to a presidential veto. But the latter option comes with a far greater risk of voter reprisal now that congress has recognised the strength of public opposition to the FCC’s position.
The drive to reverse the FCC’s ruling, which included a 750,000-signature public petition, might never have gathered so much force were it not for those determined reporters who brought the matter to the public’s attention, or those columnists – liberal and conservative alike – whose editorials on the subject were diametrically opposed to the views and ambitions of their parent companies.
One notable example is William Safire, a conservative columnist for The New York Times, who voiced his opposition to the new FCC rules even as his bosses’ bosses at The New York Times Company were lobbying to have them upheld. Safire suggested that ‘some in-house pollster should awaken President Bush to a bipartisan sleeper issue that could blindside him” in next year’s election.
But perhaps one shouldn’t heap too much praise on journalists simply for taking positions contrary to those of their managers. Management’s corporate interests should, of course, under no circumstances, impinge on editorial independence.
Try telling that to Rupert Murdoch.
Those who get their news from Fox, the American network owned by Murdoch’s Newscorp, could be forgiven for thinking that the term ‘media regulations’ referred to the parental guidance notices prefixing shots of Uday and Qusay Hussein’s grisly corpses. This may or may not have something to with the fact that Newscorp television stations reach about 40 percent of US households (5 percent more than the old regime allows) and that, as such, the company has little to gain by elevating media regulations to the status of a public interest item.
But it was across the pond that we witnessed (yet again) just how talented Murdoch is at hiring editors whose opinions lend support to his own corporate motives. After the suicide of Dr David Kelly – the source of a BBC report in May accusing the British government of exaggerating Iraq’s chemical weapons capabilities to justify the war – many in the media were asking whether heads would roll at Downing Street.
Bucking the trend, Murdoch’s Times broadsheet led with a story about how the incident had plunged the BBC ‘into the biggest crisis of its postwar history.” On the same day, the Sun, Murdoch’s top-selling tabloid, featured a double page spread headlined ‘Heads must roll at the BBC,” along with a leader that said ‘the BBC is in the gutter.”
It is unlikely that Murdoch expressly instigated these attacks on the BBC’s credibility. Then again, he didn’t have to. The editors of his publications, who presumably value their jobs, are all too aware of their boss’s unflagging support for Prime Minister Tony Blair, as well as his equally consistent tirades against the BBC, which just happens to be one of the Australian mogul’s largest UK competitors.
In stark contrast, the members of the BBC’s editorial board now stand in open defiance of their own employer, the British government, which has insisted that the public broadcaster retract its allegations.
‘Our integrity is under attack,” said BBC chairman Gavyn Davies, ‘and we are chastened for taking a different view on editorial from that of the government and its supporters. Because we have had the temerity to do this, it is hinted that a system that has protected the BBC for 80 years be swept away and replaced by an external regulator that will ‘bring the BBC to heel.’”
Regardless of whether the BBC erred in its reportage of Kelly’s statements, its freedom to criticise the government – particularly on something as significant as the rationale for a war – goes to the very basis of why countries need public broadcasters. The proper role of a public broadcaster is to act in the service of truth, uninfluenced by the commercial imperatives of a Rupert Murdoch or the political agenda of a Tony Blair.
Try telling that to Thami Mazwai.
Perhaps the SABC board member and head of the news subcommittee is correct in his belief that objectivity in journalism is ‘a delusion that not exist.” Despite his unfortunate choice of words, Mazwai alludes to a view that is not without its proponents in academic and press circles.
Objectivity, the argument goes, is an unreachable ideal, because every editor and journalist brings to his desk a lifetime’s-worth of cultural and ideological baggage that inevitably, whether consciously or not, finds expression in his work. Where this view differs from Mazwai’s, however, is that it still treats objectivity as an ideal – something to which journalists should aspire, though it eludes their grasp.
Mazwai’s view is less defensible, albeit no less widely held. Mazwai appears to regard objectivity as a journalistic peccadillo, to be sacrificed on the altar of whichever ideologies the boss deems more noble than objectivity, and, by implication, more noble than truth.
The Orwellian implications of such a view finding a voice at the highest echelons of our public broadcaster are all the more frightening in light of the dramatic events currently underway on the political scene. The investigation of a deputy president is, after all, heady stuff.
The coming months will undoubtedly represent a test case for the independence of the SABC. Let us hope that the public broadcaster remembers that its primary responsibility is to South Africa’s people and its constitution, rather than its leaders.
Tim Spira is The Media’s correspondent in New York.