It’s highly improbable that Dr. Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri missed the implications of Britain’s Hutton Inquiry. As the most significant event in the evolution of public service broadcasting since Sir John Reith developed the BBC model in the late 1920s, Lord Hutton’s report would surely have done more than pique the interest of South Africa’s Minister of Communications. For at stake was the relationship between a public broadcaster and the state, an issue that had become one of the dominant themes in Matsepe-Casaburri’s long and formidable career.
What our minister would no doubt have noticed was that the BBC, that citadel of Reithian political independence, had been drastically enfeebled because of a few seconds of news coverage on an obscure 6.07 a.m. radio broadcast. The ‘beeb’ had challenged the seat of British political power by alleging that Tony Blair’s government needed to “sex up” its justification for war with Iraq, so Lord Hutton had emasculated it while the world watched.
Our minister would surely also have noticed the British press’s reaction to Lord Hutton’s hatchet job. “The strength of [Lord Hutton’s] criticism of this broadcast, the engine that makes these few seconds of airtime into the greatest catastrophe in the BBC’s history, is a ruling so fundamental in its effect that, if applied rigorously, it could destroy BBC journalism for ever,” went one in-depth 5 000-word article in the London Review of Books. “Imagine a BBC that checks all its output all the time for potentially ‘false accusations of fact impugning the integrity of others, including politicians’, and refuses to broadcast anything that might conceivably pose such a risk.”
So, reiterating that it was too significant an event for her to ignore, what would our minister have made of the Hutton saga and editorial sentiments like those above? Would she have been reminded of the South African press’s “liberalist” bias? Would she have seen shades of the alarmist attitude exhibited by the local press towards the “upward referral” provisions in the SABC draft editorial policies? A knee-jerk response from the same ideological font as all those articles suggesting that the SABC, under its newly-appointed board, is an ANC mouthpiece?
Clearly, if Matsepe-Casaburri did indeed draw such parallels, journalists would be the last to know. The minister does not make many public statements, rarely holds press conferences, and hardly ever grants personal interviews. Most of the voices approached for comment in this article registered little surprise that the minister would not speak to The Media, one even guessing (correctly): “She didn’t respond with a ‘no’, right? She simply neglected to acknowledge your existence—”
Of course her silence is one of the reasons Matsepe-Casaburri gets a better rap in the local press than the female cabinet ministers with whom she is sometimes compared. The outspoken foreign affairs minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and equally vociferous health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang have borne the brunt of far more Sunday Times “Mampara of the week” jibes and Zapiro cartoon satires than the low-key boss of the communications department.
Professor Ruth Teer-Tomaselli, a prominent University of Natal academic who served on the SABC board during Matsepe-Casaburri’s tenure as board chairperson in the mid-’90s, suggests the minister’s non-relationship with the press is a conscious attempt at establishing mutual disinterest, a sort of “I’ll leave you alone if you leave me alone” strategy.
“The worst she’ll do is not return phone calls,” says Teer-Tomaselli. “She won’t vilify the press. She won’t make remarks about ‘white liberals’. She’s made it perfectly clear she’s not playing the publicity game.”
This unwillingness to “play the game” may be forgivable in an age of general journalistic enthusiasm for sensation and oversimplification – and for its part the press no doubt appreciates being denigrated by one less minister – but a no-speak policy has its own consequences. Silence must often be interpreted as consent, and Matsepe-Casaburri’s silence is especially deafening on issues of media freedom.
Vincent Gore, former deputy spokesperson on communications for the Democratic Alliance (DA) and currently Independent Democrat candidate for a seat in the National Assembly, is highly critical of Matsepe-Casaburri’s failure to distance herself from Dlamini-Zuma’s recent statement of support for a draconian Zimbabwean media law. (“How does government registration of journalists translate into government control of the media?” Dlamini-Zuma had asked, referring to the judgement in February by four Zanu-PF aligned supreme court justices that a press-licensing law did not conflict with Zimbabwe’s constitution).
“I would have expected the Department of Communications to uphold our own constitution on freedom of expression, to have said something,” Gore told The Media. “Ivy’s silence is disturbing on the matter. The government’s silence is disturbing, but particularly hers.”
And silence has another consequence – it lets a lot of criticism go unanswered. One of Matsepe-Casaburri’s harshest critics, member of parliament and DA spokeswoman on communications Dene Smuts, has consistently attacked the minister and her department for what she sees as the ANC’s blatant attempt to control the state’s independent media and regulatory organs.
“Ivy’s attempt throughout her incumbency has been to take greater control of not only the SABC but also the regulator Icasa,” says Smuts.
In 2002, according to Smuts and many others, that attempt took the form of the draft Broadcasting Amendment Bill, which proposed that SABC journalists and the SABC board be made subject to “minister-approved policy on reporting.”
It seemed at the time that the minister recognised the controversial nature of the bill, because she gave a rare media briefing, saying, “we want accurate information from the broadcaster, not control, and therefore you must set policies in place.”
But the retort from the South African National Editor’s Forum (Sanef) a few days later revealed just how tricky media statements could be. “If her wish is to have an editorial policy,” said Sanef, “she should communicate that. It does not need to be a law that then gives her power to approve the policy.”
In the event the Broadcasting Amendment Bill, unconstitutional as it was, never made it onto the statute books. However 2003 saw those promised SABC editorial policies make an appearance in draft form, with a contentious clause about “upward referral”, which suggested that the SABC CEO and board should have the final say in cases where journalists were unsure about the “potential commercial and political harm” that could be caused by broadcasting controversial news.
This time the minister did not have much to say in response to the ensuing media outcry, so it was assumed that an article by ANC spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama, published in the Sunday Times, adequately represented her views. “There is—nothing unique or sinister about the SABC proposal concerning upward referral,” wrote Ngonyama, pointing out that the BBC had similar policies. “The precise advantage of the BBC directives is their transparency, which makes it unnecessary to speculate about ‘an invisible censor’.”
The final report on the Hutton Inquiry, made public in early 2004, would show that Ngonyama’s comparison was a bit misplaced – the BBC, it turned out, had a censor that was far from invisible. But by then a new SABC board had been appointed anyway, one which was severely maligned by the press and political opposition for its alleged ANC bias, and one which neither Matsepe-Casaburri, nor Ngonyama, nor any ANC member, would apologise for.
Says the DA’s Smuts: “At the last round of appointments of the SABC board they lost all attempts at achieving consensus. This as an Africanist and ANC board that tolerates no correspondence. It uses a blunt instrument.”
Would that be the blunt instrument wielded in January and February? Senior SABC managers, who have been known to complain miserably about press victimisation, must have found the first few months of 2004 particularly harsh. First there was the flak from the broadcast of the ANC election manifesto, then the Mail & Guardian‘s revelation that board member Cecil Msomi had earned commission for placing an ANC radio advert on the broadcaster’s Ukhozi FM (no action was taken against Msomi), and next the disclosure that SAfm radio presenter Dianne Kohler-Barnard was a DA election candidate (Kohler-Barnard was asked to resign). Again, if Matsepe-Casaburri had opinions on the conclusions the private media were drawing, she was keeping them to herself.
But while there hasn’t been much to dissuade the press from sympathising with the view of Smuts that the minister’s plan is part of a clear-cut ANC agenda – “what they want is control of propaganda” – it’s here that the tendency to oversimplification may come into play. Professor Tawana Kupe, head of media studies at Wits University, suggests that criticism of the minister, and her silence, are an inevitable consequence of a policy choice:
“Dr. Matsepe-Casaburri clearly comes from the school of communication policy making which believes that the executive branch of government defines the policy framework – it listens to comments, but sees through its objectives. She clearly believes also that government has a strong role to play in directing the public broadcaster in the national interest. This is not her invention. Many politicians believe in it, but will not say so publicly for fear they will be perceived as seeking to control a public broadcaster, turning it into a mouthpiece of the government.”
The distinction is subtle, but important. It’s the difference between simply assuming that Matsepe-Casaburri is actively involved in the ANC’s appropriation of the public broadcaster as an instrument of propaganda, and giving some credibility to the view that she endorses the government’s use of the public broadcaster as a tool to address national concerns.
Unfortunately the minister’s handling of some other state utilities within her department’s portfolio does not give the press cause to entertain the more sanguine outlook. In both 2002 and 2003 she got an ‘F’ on the Mail & Guardian‘s annual cabinet scorecard for, amongst other things, stalling the process on the selection of a second fixed-line telephone operator to compete with Telkom and protecting the Post Office through exorbitant license fees on courier companies.
Given this record, Matsepe-Casaburri’s re-appointment to the cabinet after the April elections is anyone’s guess. Although she must get credit for addressing the information technology sector’s need for a Convergence Act and initiating the process of liberalisation in the telecommunications sector, both have been fraught with problems. Her work ethic and unstinted devotion to her task is a fact attested to by all who have dealt with her – as is her charm and likeability – but the results do not speak for themselves.
So the press speaks for her, and closest to the press’s heart are the factors that affect the media sector. Matsepe-Casaburri’s silence on media repression in Zimbabwe will worry journalists, as will recent events at the SABC. The minister is no doubt aware that the Reithian ideal of politically independent public broadcasting is under severe threat in the very country where it was first implemented – what remains to be seen is how far she, or her successor, applies that threat to the South African context.
Britain’s worst-case scenario is spelled out by the London Review of Books: “Lord Hutton’s supposed rule must apply generally. So we must also imagine the kind of ‘democratic society’ we would have if all television, radio and print news organisations followed with Huttonesque rigour what Lord Hutton says is the law. There would be calm, certainly, and quiet reportage of ministerial achievement, but there would not be democracy as we know it.”
If Dr. Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri thinks that assessment is over-the-top, we’d like to hear from her.