A barrage of criticism burst forth after the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) was accused of operating a politically motivated ”blacklist” to exclude controversial commentators. But there’s a need to get beyond knee-jerk responses and still-to-be-tested allegations.
The accusations against the SABC bring to mind the Dixie Chicks singers, who criticised the United States invasion of Iraq and got banned from ClearChannel-owned radio stations in their country. Similar McCarthyite conduct, and worse, was commonplace in apartheid South Africa.
But the issue now with the SABC is not a generic one — ranging across musicians, sources of news, or the people featured in studio audiences or vox pops. It is not even to do with documentary-makers (although the issues are not too dissimilar). It is about commentators called upon to speak as experts in current affairs programming.
It’s a truism that for every expert featured in and by the media, others are not. This zero sum equation is usually invisible to the public, because media mainly signal by presence rather than absence.
On the whole, therefore, we have to take on good faith that experts used by the media deserve to be there. We don’t usually know the whos or the whys of people not featured.
So, a key point raised by the rumpus is the constructed character of commentary. Who is invited to speak as an ”expert”, and who is not, is a statement about power and knowledge in society, blacklist or no blacklist.
However, operating a blacklist goes further. It is an organised process of gatekeeping that raises the stakes of authority and legitimacy in meaning-making. Even if informal and transient, blacklisting blocks certain persons from being given the status of experts. This measure can be abused for a range of reasons, but it can also be a necessary case of quality control.
The SABC issue is not about keeping quacks and crazies out of the ”expert” circuit, but whether genuine experts have been gagged for their political leanings.
Dali Mpofu, the broadcaster’s CEO, says heads will roll if there has been such politically motivated exclusion. That, in turn, depends on the findings of the two people (in my judgement, ”experts”) appointed by Mpofu to probe the affair: a former head of the SABC, Zwelakhe Sisulu, and a longstanding media lawyer, Gilbert Marcus.
The pair will no doubt be scrutinising the performance of news boss Snuki Zikalala to see if there were indeed political motivations masquerading as editorial decisions. The man, however, might well have legitimate reasons for ruling out some names — no matter how knowledgeable the individuals may be on some things, if they’re not close to the issue concerned, they’re unsuited to be commentators in that respect.
The panel will also need to disentangle substantive evidence from personal grudges among many of the accusers (some are former staffers with axes to grind).
To do all this successfully, Sisulu and Marcus need to have clear criteria for what properly constitutes an expert and, conversely, when it is acceptable to exclude a person from this status. Ideally, though, they will also go deeper into when and why the SABC decides that it needs outside experts, and into how the broadcaster’s journalists treat these particular kinds of sources.
Publicising a diversity of opinions, important for any medium, is absolutely fundamental to a public-service broadcaster. But not every person with an opinion merits being treated as an expert. Real experts are, of course, supposed to do more than merely supply opinion. Their role is to analyse information and thereby locate it within a higher level of understanding. They are, in short, supposed to give us knowledge.
Knowledge is primary, but it would be a mistake to think that you can find an opinion-free and perfectly non-aligned expert. Everyone comes with perspectives and assumptions, even scientists. What distinguishes one from the other is their integrity and independence plus their training, institutional linkage and reputation among their professional peers.
Even here, though, it would be wrong to relay only the orthodoxy. Dissidents among the experts may have something to add, even if only by delineating the predominant consensus. One hastens to add that the dramatic counterposing of expert versus expert — that is, controversy simply for controversy’s sake — is the function of entertainment, not journalism. Journalism should clarify, not cloud.
At any rate, whether mainstream or minority, a source’s elevation to expert status needs to be justified by the media. By contextualising the individual concerned, it also helps audiences evaluate just how authoritative the specialist may be. The SABC’s guidelines in this regard, or the lack thereof, need to be looked at in the enquiry.
This issue of ”who” points us to ”how” — the way that experts should be handled by journalists, and Sisulu and Marcus ought to examine this issue as well. No expert should be let loose to pontificate at will. A journalist is not a traffic cop, reduced to directing traffic flow. Nor is a journalist a technical worker providing mere scaffolding for a soapbox.
Yet, to be a proactive and independent value-add to any communication occasion, journalists themselves need expertise. Without this, they cannot conduct a conversation, on behalf of an audience, with any particular expert source/s at hand.
That means that journalists have to take research seriously, and preferably have depth in a particular reporting beat. They can then ask informed questions and even challenge the experts when need be. If a media house grows this calibre of journalist, then striving to screen out experts for hidden interests becomes less of a critical concern. Again, the SABC needs assessing in these respects: What is the calibre of its journalists in relation to expertise and handling experts?
If the ”blacklist” controversy culminates in the SABC seriously boning up the abilities of its reporters, South Africa as a whole will gain. This is because the deeper issue is not Snuki Zikalala’s politics, but rather the need for the broadcaster to upgrade its own expertise.
What we need are SABC journalists who are competent to complement — and/or contradict — expert sources, with these sources having diverse political flavours that are surfaced, not effaced or eliminated. And, oftentimes, we also need the journalists themselves to be our experts — with them providing independent and informed analysis. If the Sisulu-Marcus team goes deep, it could help bring us all closer to this.