Tim Spira, our acerbic columnist in New York, has an eye for a pithy quote. This month he found a doozy. By David Milch, creator and writer of the TV show NYPD Blue, the quote is an ideal prologue to The Media‘s April 2004 issue. Here goes: ‘A politician doesn’t want to mess too much with the media beast, because his success or failure depends on how the beast treats him. But he also knows that the electorate expects him to occasionally go up and smack the beast, then beat his chest. The beast goes ‘oooh, ohhh,’ then looks at him and winks.”
Of course the quote is about US media, which is currently oiling the wheels of the US presidential elections. In South Africa, as in the UK, things are slightly different. The latter have large and dominant public broadcasters, and when these media beasts ‘wink” it’s not necessarily in lieu of promised commercial favours. As Lord Hutton’s emasculation of the BBC showed, media’s subservience to political power can be about something less subtle than monetary reward.
Against this backdrop we feature South Africa’s communications minister, Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, as the 2004 election month cover. Our minister may not go around ‘smacking” local media – she has a no-speak press policy that essentially precludes any sort of interaction – but her actions (and non-actions) make one thing clear: she’s not a big fan of meaningful political independence at the SABC.
So the cover story, taken together with some of the other items in this month’s issue, may give the reader the impression that The Media has adopted a one-sided view of certain ministerial and ruling party attitudes towards media freedom. We have. By us, foreign affairs minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s overt support for repressive Zimbabwean media legislation is untenable, as is Matsepe-Casaburri’s silence on the matter. Such support represents a threat to our own platform, and has sparked radical opposition amongst senior journalists.
To qualify our partiality, we would like to remind readers that in previous issues we have done our utmost to highlight local media’s shortcomings, both around coverage of the government and in general. We have also, in many of the 17 issues prior to this one, praised a number of government and ruling party voices for safeguarding the best of what South African media has to offer. Sadly, this month we have no option but to echo the hopes of Independent Democrat leader Patricia De Lille: ‘At the end of the day I respect the fearless independence of the media, and that’s my only wish, that the media must be fearlessly independent.”