Does Jacob Zuma read poetry? Presuming he does, I wonder what the former deputy president thinks of the gruff verse of Roy Campbell. Also born in KwaZulu-Natal, albeit to patrician parents, Campbell was scathing in his dismissal of the local press, once remarking how “the precocious tadpole, from his bog, becomes a journalist ere half a frog”.
On Monday, June 6 this year, a clutter of unruly tadpoles converged on the ANC’s Johannesburg headquarters, hoping that 63-year-old Zuma might have a neatly framed response to Judge Hilary Squires’ finding of a “generally corrupt” relationship existing between him and Schabir Shaik, his financial adviser. Their anticipation was coldly rebuffed, journalists forced to stand behind a tape barricade across the street from Chief Albert Luthuli House. Two days later Zuma finally, if rather indirectly, addressed the precocious tadpoles.
Speaking to business and political leaders at a breakfast in East London, Zuma stated: “The manner in which this has been dealt with has been grossly unfair. The media have used this case for political reasons.”
Three days later he was relieved of his duties.
So what’s any of this got to do with media training? Quite a lot, if you accept that South African journalism is at a point of crisis, its values pilloried, rank and file journalists dismissed as reptiles involved in a “hysterical trial by the media” of Zuma, a turn of phrase employed by Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi.
Writing in the Mail & Guardian last October, Guy Berger penned an elegant response to such impassioned oratory, stating: “Many in the ‘trial by media’ chorus seem to think there must be an ulterior motive for the media to publish discrediting information about an evidently innocent man. Here’s the score: media people publish these stories because it is their business to do so.”
An unequivocal assertion of the media’s right to cover issues of public interest, one might be inclined to say that’s that. But it’s not, not by half.
Writing in a new collection of essays, published under the title Changing the Fourth Estate, Berger assumes a decidedly more relativist stance when it comes to defending the quality of local journalism. The Rhodes University academic and council member of the South African National Editors Forum (Sanef) kicks off the book with a rousing put down.
In the first paragraph of the first chapter Berger declares that local journalism “lags behind” the transformation agenda, further stating that it has made a lot less impact on our transitional society than, for instance, television dramas or advertising.
“Too much of our reporting is dull, dry and predictable – and of interest only to a bunch of middle-aged elites,” he writes, before repeating the findings of the 2002 Sanef skills audit report. Um, ja, thanks for the compliment Guy, and the reminder. For those of us who forgot, the Sanef report revealed fundamental deficiencies in the capabilities of local journalists.
A punk rocker once remarked that extreme fatalism is optimism. I would not describe Berger as a fatalist, more of an optimist caught in the doldrums. The positive aspect of Berger’s optimism is revealed in a terse statement nearing the end of his introductory chapter. “Our country deserves a new paradigm of journalism,” he writes, adding that it is also a realisable ambition.
A recent report on curriculum developments in Berger’s department at Rhodes University, the country’s oldest and largest journalist training institution, suggests there is both substance and meaning to this potentially hackneyed expression.
“Today the dual ethical responsibility of acting as democracy watchdog and contributing to a South African nationalism is much more precarious and challenging,” writes Leonhard Praeg of the Department of Journalism and Media Studies, author of the report. “Gone are the days of moral clarity that accompanied a relatively simplistic ideology of black and white, right and wrong. This has been replaced by the demand, made of all citizens and in particular the media, to critically contribute to the process of democratising a deeply divided society.”
In a Rhodes Journalism Review article Joe Thloloe, Sanef chair and formerly editor-in-chief of e.tv news, encapsulated the essence of this when he wrote: “We need to give our audience a sense of what it is to be South African on the African continent and connected to the world.”
This disarmingly simple proposition raises many complex questions, says Praeg. “What are the media needs of this new society? What kinds of journalists should be trained? How should they be trained? To what extent should the socio-economic conditions – illiteracy, aliteracy and the status of radio and print versus new media and technology – determine the emphasis on media training?”
Writing last year for this publication, Graeme Addison condensed all of this into a single query. “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.” He ended on an inquisitive note. “Funny though. We don’t think too much about what we are training journalists for.”
I put this (as a question) to journalist, educator and author of Writing for the Media, Francois Nel: “Training, by definition, is about giving folks the competencies for a task,” he said. “For those charged with that responsibility, whether in the classroom or the newsroom, that has traditionally meant training to get the story and to get it out to audiences. Increasingly, though, that view is being challenged.”
He likens the problem confronting the media industry with those facing oil companies, the latter increasingly under pressure to revise their business models to take into account the impact of their activities on the environment and consumers. Elanie Steyn and Arnold de Beer agree. Academics from the North-West University and University of Stellenbosch respectively, the pair recently published a paper on local journalism skills in the quarterly international journal, Journalism Studies.
“The Sanef audit is considered by the media industry to be but the first step towards improving the overall standard of journalism in the country,” they write. “Though a daunting task, it is realised that journalism skills cannot be viewed in isolation, but that future training and education should take cognisance of the scope and impact of social, economic, political and technological factors shaping and transforming the post-apartheid media industry.”
So far so good, everyone’s talking change. Thing is, though, how are the tertiary institutions practically implementing it?
At the University of Port Elizabeth, for instance, there is a “radical approach to curriculum design”. According to programme leader, Bianca Wright, speaking last year at Rhodes University’s first colloquium on media education and training, the aim is “to equip students with more than just skills in one discipline, but rather to produce graduates that are critically reflective, multi-skilled, technically proficient and possessing of a broad theoretical and contextual framework”. Note the emphasis on convergence.
Meanwhile, the University of Cape Town established a major in Media and Writing in 2002, a course that is neither a major in Journalism nor in Media Studies – “something that combines what we believe are the strengths of both,” said Ian Glenn earlier this year, at the second colloquium on media education and training, also held in Grahamstown.
By comparison, Rhodes University stresses a more purist approach, their aim being to produce “ethically conscious, well informed, critical journalists”. According to Praeg, the objective is to produce “a self-critical journalism training curriculum; one which would allow journalism to actively participate in the re-production of the nation as imagined community while being critically aware of the powerful role the media plays in the process”. In less abstruse language, this means that future Rhodes graduates will be postcolonial optimists possessing a measure of postmodern doubt.
Praeg is aware of the potential contradiction. “To the extent that it chooses not to combine journalism with the arts of persuasion but rather with critical theory, the Rhodes Journalism department embraces this ambivalence.”
If the totality of this proposition seems rather erudite and highfalutin, it might help to simplify once again and state that the core idea here is one of criticality. According to the 2002 Sanef report, local journalists exhibited poor analytical and critical skills, as well as a deficiency in general, historical and contextual knowledge.
Says Praeg: “The problem is not what is being taught but how it is being taught — An integrated teaching model would allow theory and practice teachers to question each other’s basic assumptions in a constructive manner.”
Nicely put. But, what do Campbell’s “squadrons of the press” make of all this? I put the question to a couple of colleagues and peers in the industry.
“I found that my stint at Rhodes taught me practical tools like basic writing skills and putting stories into context,” says Angelique Serrao, a journalist at The Star. “It also taught me to think out the box and to question everything around me, but when it came to actual on the job experience it fell a bit flat.”
Looking at it from the opposite perspective, as a former acting editor of the Sunday World, Sandile Memela is unequivocal. An award winning journalist, columnist and, most recently, author of the book, Flowers of the Nation, he says: “I sincerely believe that our institutions are failing to deliver literate people. In fact, graduates who can read and write, let alone spell correctly, are as scarce as a hen’s teeth. Instead, newsrooms are increasingly filled by under-qualified rappers and leg men who are only useful for information gathering purposes.”
In many ways Memela’s insight positions us in front of a defining paradox, one that squarely confronts South Africa’s new paradigm of journalism. Guy Berger hinted at it in 1996 already, remarking: “We teach and evaluate in English at Rhodes – but many of our students who struggle in this regard could star if they end up in jobs in African language journalism.”
Training, however, is not singularly an activity that takes place in a tertiary institution. Memela, currently chief director of marketing and communication in the Department of Arts and Culture, argues a position that allocates some of the blame for the poor state of local journalism to media houses.
“The owners of the media are not interested in providing education and training as thinking and talented journalists would pose a direct threat to the economic status quo that perpetuates injustice, elite classism and wealth monopoly,” he says.
Such commentary, contestable as it probably is, yet equally necessary if the subject of training is to go beyond mere talk, prompts an admittedly simplistic question, the crudeness of which reframes in very simple English the foregoing debate. That question: is it tickets for local journalism?
The ambivalence, or not, with which you responded to this question is probably a key marker of the answer.
Sean O’Toole is an independent journalist based in Johannesburg. He writes for the Sunday Times and is editor of Art South Africa