An astute media professor, confronted with the apathy of his first-year journalism class, throws a question into the lecture hall. ‘Do the media reflect or represent society?” he asks. The class’s interest is piqued when the good professor explains why anyone should care. If the answer is the former, he says, the media paints an accurate and comprehensive picture of the country we live in; if it’s the latter, the media are leaving something out.
One enduring event from the last few months confirms that South African media continues to leave stuff out, that our society is still ‘re-presented’ in the service of mysterious political agendas. As Tawana Kupe writes on page 36, the Zuma affair is playing out like a soap opera, and ‘the news media has never looked so interesting.”
But while the likes of Zuma, Ngcuka, Shaik, Maharaj and Maduna may be driving sales and ratings, there’s a vague feeling that a power struggle over presidential succession is going on behind the scenes. Why don’t we know more about this? Can we know more?
It’s unlikely that the media is consciously complicit. In an article on the consequences of oversimplification on page 26, Paula Slier intimates that ‘dumbing down’ is a spin-off of deadlines and cross-platform competition. So maybe it’s because of production mechanisms that we aren’t getting a more detailed account of Zuma and the gang.
Fortunately, we do have some media with a willingness to expose the gaps in South African society, to provide background and context. Are television’s weekly current affairs programmes the best example? Graeme Addison makes a compelling case for it on page 16. ‘The box is forever renewing its image of South Africans as a nation at the end of the universe, banqueting, as it were, on the truth,” he writes. ‘Pain mixed with pride in self-examination is the trademark of our special brand of documentary TV.”