A week is a long time in journalism, but not long enough for some hacks, who need more time to mull over and respond to questions about training for their profession. “You must understand that ours is a deadline-driven business,” lectured one senior colleague to the intern student who is now working for me, “be patient”. Knowing full well that this article too was a deadline product, the journo probably figured that he would never have to respond at all. Nice.
Vuyo Tom, the intern doing the research, remarked to me that I was right when I warned him journalists (and media people generally) were the worst when it came to getting comment out of them. But, having spent half a lifetime training media people myself, who am I to kick against the pricks?
So let’s square the balance, to mix an accounting metaphor. Yes, the more than two dozen institutions of higher learning that turn out eager young scribes, image-makers, and assorted copy-writing trapeze artistes, have done a noble job of providing the country with functionaries who can push a pen or press a console button.
Trouble is, I am not sure these acolytes – attendants on the mighty South African media — are being trained in the arts and attitudes of critical thinking, including self-criticism. This is not a new allegation, by me or anyone else. The South African National Editors Forum (Sanef) is well aware of the unhappiness in every quarter, from government to their own editors.
A “skills audit” report released by Sanef in May 2002 concluded that all sorts of institutional changes would help to equip journalists for the critical and accountable task of reporting accurately and independently in a changing South Africa. Every news editor in the country has a beef about the lack of competence, general knowledge and passion of newly minted graduates (despite the fact that most of them, nowadays, are of that coin themselves).
What exactly is wrong here? My theory is that South African journalism falls between two world archetypes of what media and communications work should be about.
The Objective Observer and the Activist Mobiliser struggle for dominance within the hearts of our more conscientious media people; and it is a struggle that goes back to the days of The Struggle and beyond. Media training establishments have never yet successfully developed a critique of the observer/activist dichotomy and do not look likely to do so anytime soon.
The reason for that, in my shamelessly materialist opinion, is that media training departments depend on funding from established media sources and they work within conservative academic structures. For its part, the ANC government has made clear that it wants journalists to be team players in national renewal and development. But serving the governors is not a mission that independent minded journalists, or their teachers, can readily embrace. Our poverty-stricken society, laced with the misery of Aids and shot through with the cynicism of enrichment at all human costs, challenges media people to commit themselves. This has the training schools intellectually puzzled, as they search for a paradigm that permits independent, though supportive, developmental journalism. While the dons dither, the media require recruits.
So media people are trained to fit, not fight.
The Sanef skills audit report quoted former Sowetan editor, then CEO of Jacaranda FM, Mike Siluma, as saying that the media were gradually moving away from the racially-defined boxes of the past and that lifestyle, rather than colour, was becoming the key determinant for audiences. One has to agree that race per se is less of a determinant of what is reported, who reports and how they report. But the socio-economic reality of South Africa is that most of the poor are black, while most journalists work for media that cater for the lifestyle interests of the middle class, of whatever race.
No wonder journalists are expected to report on lifestyles. That’s the way to fit in, not flip out.
Not that it always impresses. Anastasia de Vries of Rapport — who won the 2003 Mondi award for Creative and Opinionated Journalism while working for Beeld — told us: “Apart from students trained at Stellenbosch, the only ones who really knew how to approach and package a story for news are those from the technikons. Few ever attempted an in-depth article, as if they thought journalism is all about collecting fluff.”
But fitting in has its strong points, nowhere more so than in marketing communications — which is right for the craft and what you would expect. Still, Eira Sands of Hunt Lascaris TWBA gave us pause for thought when she said that her interns could fit in and think for themselves too:
“We currently have six students from the Vega School in Durban,” she said. “They spent last year doing the course offered by The Imagination Lab (at Vega) and are with us for a one year apprenticeship. They are currently funded by the Services Seta and are at the same time involved with the Seta Learnerships for which Vega are the service provider.
“We have been very happy with their level of competency and have found them to be proactive and yes — able to think and add value to our business.”
Proactive and think? Lenin wanted those qualities in agitprop personnel: they should be creative ideologists. They are also the qualities that Italian communist Antonio Gramsci discerned as the real danger posed by the intelligentsia of the ruling class, who constantly remade the message of hegemony to suit current circumstances. They could think and be proactive too.
Since I must bear some responsibility for the way training has turned out in this country it is time to be a bit self-critical about it all. Liberal fundamentalism, which I have taught as an article of faith, holds that journalists are engaged in a search for truth. Recently I had the experience of judging the Castle Premiership soccer print and broadcasting journalism competition and was pleased that several top candidates were former students of mine.
What chagrin then, in the week that the awards were announced, to have the Sunday Times report that soccer match-fixing corruption was widespread. Not one of my former students had submitted a line about it, and apparently they were keen only to get credit for writing partisan reports. They were on the team with the soccer bosses, bent referees, and boozy players, all keeping silent about the scandal for years. And years.
Plenty of soccer reporters knew the truth and did not need to search for it. If they were corrupted it was by the consensus that soccer mattered more than graft — that the goals justified the bribes.
It all comes down to thinking — even philosophising — about the moral responsibilities of the Profession. Or Craft. Or Trade.
I was a lowly Graduate Assistant in the Rhodes Journalism Department in 1974 when the then Professor, Tony Giffard, who had started the Department in 1969 at the behest of Guy Butler, told me that journalism was “simply a battle against error”. I have thought about that ever since.
Whose error? Do journos start by making errors that someone else has to correct? The subs perhaps? Or did he mean that society was in error and that journalists battled to correct that? I suspected it was a bit of both but was dismayed when Giffard qualified the statement later with a very technical explanation that every proofing mistake on a page cost 5c (in 1970s terms) to fix.
You have to admire single-minded attention to newspaper economics. It’s what drives the press and always has, so trainees should get the point as soon as possible.
But anyway he was right, in the larger sense. By the time I had been through the mill as a journalism lecturer at Rhodes, and later as Head of the Department of Journalism and Public Relations at Technikon Natal, the media had, in fact, helped South Africa to correct the egregious error of apartheid. Or some said they had. If this was any occasion for smugness I was soon disabused.
My epiphany moment came in April 1994 upon my arrival at Unibo — the University of BophutaTswana — in Mmabatho (now Mafikeng) to take up the challenge of steering the Department of Communications into the new era of democracy. Not everyone agreed with this goal. While my interview for the post was in progress a ragtag army of Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweeging hoodlums rode into town in beat-up farm Chevs — with several quickly gunned down by an overzealous black security man.
The place erupted in chaos and for the two years that I was professor, chaos extended into the academy until the academy was virtually no more. Students handed their study loans over to needy families and then demonstrated for free tertiary education. The library was pillaged of books. Students were caught cheating in essays and could be expelled, but the administration caved in at the first sign of unrest. Computers hardly ever worked. It was never like this, said the old staff, under (homeland President) Lucas Mangope.
Perhaps not, but freedom had its fruits, including the taste it gave me of the Real Issues facing the majority of South Africans. Suddenly it was a lot easier to understand the activist, partisan stance of black journalists who believed that the media should be wielded as an instrument of change and development. Liberals: go drink tea.
The main thing that the students of the University of North West (the renamed Unibo) had going for them was that they really followed events in the country and were passionate about learning.
Two years later, I toured the country for the Sunday Times, visiting 18 institutions that trained journalists, to select only six candidates for the newspaper’s intake. One young lady from a renowned institution informed me that she would like to read more, but was always too tired and fell asleep.
Most of us suspect that real journalists are not made but born. My greatest admiration is still reserved for the likes of Jack London, the skid row layabout who rose to report what life was really like in the abyss of 19th century America; and our own Nat Nakasa, who slept in the kitchens of Houghton homes while illegally drifting about white Johannesburg at night, and yet made it as the first black reporter on the Rand Daily Mail.
Who trained them? Not someone with a PhD in postmodernist fictional modes of analysis applied to commercial media framing. And yet, and yet. While the seasoned scribe resents the academy, there is no practical substitute for it. People have to be trained and someone has to do the training. Funny though. We don’t think too much about what we are training journalists for.
Graeme Addison, a former Professor of Communication at the University of the North West and lecturer in journalism at Rhodes, is now a full-time author and researcher/consultant in media and marketing.