In the 1960s the average television soundbite was almost a minute. Today it’s closer to eight seconds. Similarly, print publications, ever fearful of missing out on a story, are forced to report on more issues in less space. So with trivialisation and over-simplification now an inherent by-product of journalism, we have what media analysts are calling the ‘dumbing down’ of the profession.
‘I get calls from reporters, in some cases from so-called specialists, that would make your hairs stand on end,” observes Steven Friedman, senior research fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies.
‘South African newspaper management, in the main, hasn’t understood the way journalism works. The journalist is viewed as an infinitely replaceable pair of hands with no great career opportunities and a poor salary. There’s been a juniorisation of the profession. Specialist reporters by and large don’t exist any more and our stories are vastly oversimplified and often wholly inaccurate.”
It’s a criticism Shenid Bhayroo, a lecturer in the Department of Communication Studies at RAU, hears increasingly often. He explains it’s the nature of journalism to simplify stories.
‘Stories are either event-driven, such as a fire breaking out, or issue-related. As journalists, it’s our job to turn issues into events. We do this by simplifying. We present the minimum amount of information that will allow the issue to be understood. But we need to be careful because when we simplify, we run the risk of losing the essence of the subject we are covering.”
The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a case in point. A difficult story to unpack; even more so in a one-minute-thirty-second television newsclip or an 800-word article.
‘It’s not just an issue of Arab versus Jew or Islam versus Judaism. As journalists, though, this is how we present it,” says Bhayroo.
Inherent in this way of thinking is an assumption that the viewer or listener doesn’t want the subject matter to be too difficult. But the South African consumer has changed over the last ten years, becoming a lot more sophisticated due to access to a range of news sources across broadcast, print and the Internet.
‘The diversification of news sources has only recently started happening in South Africa,” points out Suraya Dadoo, a researcher with the Media Review Network advocacy group.
‘Before 1994 South African media institutions relied a lot on overseas media, especially CNN. Almost all Western news agencies are American-owned and supportive of Israel. They tend to oversimplify the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and reduce it to a religious issue of Jew versus Muslim. There are a significant number of Christian Arabs involved who never get covered.”
Bhayroo believes it’s the analogy between apartheid and the Palestinian struggle that has seen the Mideast conflict receive so much South African press coverage.
‘It’s fine to make the comparison so long as we don’t oversimplify the issue. We need to always bring stories down to how they affect us as ordinary human beings. I’m much more interested in what a lecturer like me is experiencing in the Mideast and their take on the conflict – the human-interest view – than what the officials are saying. In this way we introduce context to our stories.”
Australian journalist John Pilger’s Carlton Television documentary, Palestine Is Still The Issue, flighted late last year on e.tv, inspired a heated reaction from both the Jewish and Muslim communities. In it Pilger explored the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza. While acknowledging that it presented only the Palestinian viewpoint, Dadoo welcomes it because ‘the other side [Israel] has been so dominant in the media.
‘The Pilger documentary brought to the fore a lot of issues people weren’t aware of. It showed that the Palestinians were not only being brutalised, but also humiliated and dehumanised,” she says.
Yehuda Kaye, national director of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, criticises the documentary because, he says, it failed to provide context.
‘There’re always two sides to this very complex story. You can make a very compelling story if, as Pilger did, you look at it only from the Palestinian perspective and interview only Israelis with extreme left-wing points of view who don’t represent mainstream society.
‘I don’t believe there’s such a thing as objective journalism but there can be an attempt to contextualise—a repeated lack of contextualisation over the years, as I believe has happened in this country’s press, is damaging.”
Kaye points out that the conflict has been presented as a kind of David and Goliath with Israel the aggressor and the Palestinians the underdog.
‘In the Middle East, there are nuances upon nuances. The conflict is land-related, political, social, religious. This is the context in which the conflict takes place and yet all journalists do is to take a snapshot. All they’ll cover in one story are the tanks rolling into the territories. None of the nuances come through. Journalists don’t check up on facts, they generalise and they quote directly.”
In such a fraught environment, Friedman argues that the test for journalists is to ask themselves whether they have conveyed the complications of what they are writing or talking about.
‘If not, you’re not adequately reporting on the issue,” he concludes. ‘You have a whole lot of people making calculations based on a fantasy presented to them by the media. Clichés are being handed around by talking heads and myths are getting communicated.”
Bhayroo echoes the warning: ‘By simplifying, we retard the development of our society from an educational, economic and informative perspective. We extract the context from a story when we simplify it and give the reader a very superficial understanding of what’s happening.”
Just as there are varying forms of storytelling, so too is there a better way of reporting.
‘As the fourth estate we hold to a higher level of responsibility to educate, inform and be a watchdog,” continues Bhayroo. ‘In South Africa we have the added responsibility of contributing to the rebuilding of our communities. Journalists should take their cue from film. The opening sequence of any movie is seldom more than a minute and yet it manages to establish context, place and time.”
Perhaps today it is more important than ever that journalists explain diversities, so that news consumers don’t lapse into comfortable stereotypes and self-justified racism. If not the journalist, who else can introduce subtle nuances to interpretations and add the human dimension to abstract concepts?
The words of the American columnist Walter Lippman can serve as a reminder: “We perform an essential service. It is no mean calling and we have a right to be proud of it, to be glad it is our work.”
Paula Slier is a senior reporter and stand-in anchorwoman at SABC news. She was posted to the Middle East during the Iraqi conflict.