/ 23 March 2004

Miserable state of affairs

An audit of newsroom leaders is about to get under way. It’s not the Human Rights Commission (HRC) probing racism, nor the Genderlinks NGO sniffing out sexism. It’s an initiative of the South African National Editors Forum (Sanef). A case of the industry examining itself.

Judging by some reactions to Genderlinks’ challenge to newspapers to kill the ”chick pix”, some editors are still touchy about external interference. We criticise you, you don’t crit us, is the mindset. Remember the resistance to the HRC’s racism investigation?

So the fact that it’s now Sanef doing the scrutinising may be more palatable to prickly editors. But that also depends on what the study unearths and what it recommends.

The audit has been in the offing for more than two years. It grew out of an earlier study of junior reporters’ skills … or more correctly, their lack thereof. The original report, done three years back, had various recommendations, including that this new audit should be done.

Since then, the democracy clock has turned to 10 and, still, all is far from well with our media content. Leave aside the enormous ethical misjudgements of 2003, and even those this year, like the Desai rape case reporting. The bigger problem is the ongoing ordinary media menu, day after day, that fails to nourish a hunger.

We suffer a severe dearth of media output where you can reasonably expect accurate information, let alone astute analysis. Anecdote: a radio station recently reported me as being a Stellenbosch University professor. Query: how much else can I assume is incorrect?

As for quality aesthetics in language and image, they are about as rare as press releases being checked before verbatim re-publication. You want edification and inspiration? Enlightenment, humour and pathos? Don’t waste time searching our media. Yes, there are exceptions — and they are precisely that: exceptions.

One factor behind this miserable state of affairs was highlighted in the original Sanef research into the skills of junior reporters. The study showed up details that were even worse than most observers imagined.

Newsroom novices had negligible general knowledge, inferior interviewing skills and abysmal language ability. They were walking legal liabilities and ethical ignoramuses. With such incriminating findings, it was inevitable that a cascade of blame-passing ensued.

Many in the industry indicted higher education for presenting poor programmes and passing incompetent student reporters. In turn, tertiary trainers took the blame further down the chain — depositing it with the schooling system. They pointed to the deficiencies of the matriculant raw material with which they had to work.

The researchers who did the study placed part of the problem elsewhere — in the way newsrooms were managed. Those accused in their turn pointed fingers upward — at business managers whose rapacity for the rand left only peanuts to secure reasonable quality staff and retain those of them who made good reporters.

The bosses indeed were making mega-bucks. However, this skills issue was one buck they were happy to pass on — to the Sector Education and Training Authority (Seta). Their view: industry paid monthly levies, thus skills development was the business of the Mappp-Seta (Media, Advertising, Publishing, Printing, Packaging Seta).

For its part, the Mappp-Seta did its own hand-washing. It claimed that it was legally bound to focus not on upgrading reporters but on ”learnerships” — that is, apprentice-style internships for the unemployed. Further, that in order for the authority to pay up for training courses for reporters, qualifications had to be drawn up. And quality controllers had to be trained to assess what had been learnt by those being trained.

That’s not the end. Responsibility for developing qualifications rests with the Department of Education, and in particular the ineffective South African Qualification Authority (Saqa). The blame process continues, because Saqa had — and has — no budget to research and design the necessary qualifications that would allow the Mappp-Seta to disburse its funds.

Some time back, I and other Sanef members took this problem back to the Mappp-Seta, eventually persuading it to allot some of its substantial pile of unspent money to meetings by volunteers wanting to get qualifications together. But resourcing for the actual R&D work is still insufficient. A paltry three qualifications have been put together over the past three years.

It took a lot of additional work over two years to get the Mappp-Seta to resource Sanef’s second-phase research into the state of media skills. The junior reporter study, to the shame of the industry, was backed by foreign funding.

To get results from South Africans ultimately required changing the leadership of the authority. After what seemed like an interminable battle against bureaucracy, the Mappp-Seta reshuffled its ranks and has now finally agreed to underwrite the new audit.

The aim of the new study will be to assess the skills of newsroom leaders — those editorial managers responsible for working with the junior reporters. The starting point will be their professional abilities, like whether they can plan ahead, mentor and coach their staffers, or troubleshoot blockages in newsflow.

These are all critical things. Yet, what’s as important is the ability of this stratum to deal with the transformational challenges of media in South Africa today — and not just race, but also gender. At issue are not just managerial improvements, but the quality of leadership and the perspective brought to the news.

The weaknesses here are all too evident in the kneejerk-ism that met the Genderlinks challenge to drop the demeaning dross typically carried in the Sunday and tabloid press.

Leading the reaction was the Sunday Times, which personalised the issue by branding Genderlinks’ Colleen Lowe Morna as mampara of the week. The paper then spewed forth the old clichés about ”Mother Grundy” spoiling readers’ innocent, sexy fun.

Capping this crap was the Hogarth column. In reference to a training course about turning a ”10 years of democracy story into a solid gender-focused election report”, the smart-assed Sunday Times writer declared that this operation meant ”cutting out the interesting bits” (ho ho).

The last refuge of these bankrupt responses to the deeper issue was, predictably, a celebration of defying ”political correctness”. The ”oh so independent” tone of a ”more frivolous than thou” mindset was infantilism at its worst.

If the Sunday Times reflects the level of creative and progressive thinking on media transformation, then South African journalism must be judged and condemned for losing sight of what the liberation struggle was all about.

I hope the Sanef audit is able to uncover some perspectives in newsroom managers that have more promise than those displayed at the Sunday Times. But even if it simply surfaces the extent of barren and backward thinking, that will be a service that shows us that the problems in the industry stem not only from the junior reporters.

How such findings will be taken by the practitioners will then be the interesting question. And a test of Sanef’s influence.

Of course, the audit has to probe for these leadership matters in the first place. If it doesn’t, the long saga of its evolution will have been in vain. We’ll still be stuck with the stupidity of Sunday Times thinking come the 20th anniversary of democracy.

E-mail Guy Berger directly if you have a question about this article.

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.