Recently the South African media has risen in unison, with a crescendo of media voices growing louder every day, all of them denouncing perceived new threats to media freedom in South Africa. The main source of this consternation is the ANC’s proposal for the establishment of a media appeals tribunal, as well as the Protection of Information Bill currently before Parliament.
The South African National Editors’ Forum, the body that represents media organisations in the country, recently issued a statement saying: “We vigorously oppose the restrictive clauses in the Protection of Information Bill and the proposed media appeals tribunal. We appeal to the South African government and the ruling ANC to abide by the founding principles of our democracy and to abandon these proposed measures.”
The media may well be correct in asserting the presence of a clear and present danger to media freedom. In time the truthfulness of these assertions will emerge. As the rest of society we will take the media’s word for it and assume that, if indeed such a threat exists, they, the media practitioners and proprietors, will resist such a threat.
No doubt South Africans, with their deep appreciation of their struggle for national liberation, the consequences of which are enshrined in our Constitution, will join the media in resisting any encroachment on our freedoms, including that of the media. It is therefore not my purpose here to dispute the basis of the media’s reaction to the proposed tribunal or to the Bill. Neither am I questioning the ANC’s and government’s underlying motivation.
Rather, I think the whole episode throws into sharp relief the fact the media is facing a severe crisis of credibility, at the root of which is its own failure to define properly the meaning of our democracy and its role in it. Numerous attempts have been made in the past to engage with the media on its role, not only in nation-building and national reconciliation but also in the critical task of transforming our society.
Activists for transformation
For example, at the launch of the Forum of Black Journalists in January 1997, then-president Thabo Mbeki exhorted the media to acknowledge that it has a critical role to play, not merely as armchair critics of government, but also as activists for transformation.
He noted in particular that “given the daunting task of emancipating our people, we believe that it is inadequate to perceive of the role of the Forum of Black Journalists simply as to keep in check the power of government, or to hold the leadership accountable.
Surely, that is only part of the role. It cannot be that organs of civil society which are interested in our social emancipation can find comfort only in pointing out the excesses and misdeeds of the democratic government as though our country has become totally free of political and ideological tendencies which would like to dilute the content of transformation or political and ideological forces which are opposed to the objective of the national democratic struggle.”
Helga Jansen, writing on the Mail & Guardian‘s Thought Leader website, makes a similar point, albeit unwittingly — that the media must share some of the blame for these threats to its freedom, because “we allowed the media to become the ‘unofficial’ opposition”.
As the media readies itself to engage in what the editor of the M&G has aptly called “the fight of our lives”, it may behove the media to undertake some serious introspection about its own culpability. This must include reassessing the validity of the source of its “otherness” posture in our society.
In the first instance the South African media needs to acknowledge that, at the dawn of our democracy in 1994, it chose the comfort zone of adversarial “independence” instead of engagement and partnership with the country’s majority citizens whose struggle and sacrifices made media freedom possible.
Borrowed Western template
Instead of aligning itself with the country’s developmental objectives of reversing the colonial and apartheid legacy of oppression and neglect of the African majority, the media chose to isolate itself in a borrowed Western and liberal template of “media freedom”, which it then rationalised as “independence”, the measure of which in turn became articulated and projected as the extent to which the media is able to “boldly” express its variance with the authorities, in this instance the ANC and the government it leads.
In this paradigm the media assumed that there is fundamentally no difference between an ANC democratic government and the colonial and apartheid governments it replaced.
The folly of this “independence” paradigm is the credence it lends to a perception, held by most black people, that the media in South Africa is in fact the opposition, as Jansen says. The basis of this perception is that the South African media has failed concomitantly to transform itself in a manner that suggests that it too has a responsibility for the creation of a better life for the masses of South Africa.
Instead it has chosen a conjuring trick, celebrating being free by negating the very ideas and social forces that produced freedom. It has adopted a posture that suggests media freedom was achieved against the ANC’s wishes.
Accordingly, it has not just appointed itself a beneficiary of media freedom, with the rest of society, but has also arrogated to itself a custodianship role, which it uses to decide which voices are heard and which are not.
The media does this because it has made the fundamental and erroneous assumption that the freedom achieved in 1994 merely introduced a missing element in an otherwise “normal” set of relations between the media and the state. Thus, without any sense of irony, those masses who fought for liberation (including media freedom) are today projected, by omission or commission, as the proverbial barbarians at the gate against whom media freedom must be protected.
Alienated
The unfortunate consequence of this is that, because the media has effectively rejected any engagement with the majority of South Africans, it is alienated from majority opinion.
It cannot shape public opinion because it has no legitimate basis on which to articulate public interest. For example, the inexplicable insistence on using only English and Afrikaans as media for all news coverage further compounds the media’s alienation from majority opinion.
What this means, effectively, is that the media is structurally unable to know what black South Africans think about any given policy issue, leading to a permanent disjunction between what most South Africans think and what is reflected as “public opinion” in the media.
Ultimately the threat to media freedom does not come from a government that is “sensitive to criticism”, or from an ANC that hankers after a glorious oppressive past, but from a media that continues to cover issues that affect the daily lives of ordinary South Africans in the townships and in rural areas only cursorily and in patronisingly philanthropic terms, thus making the majority of citizens in this country feel as though they are sojourners prying into “other” people’s news every time they open a newspaper.
Monde Nkasawe is the general manager for policy and planning in the office of the premier in the Eastern Cape. He writes in his personal capacity.