There’s Manyi a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip but, honestly, if you’re in charge of communicating with the media, should you really be thinking with your ego rather than, for lack of a better word, what we’ll agree to call your brain?
Jimmy Manyi, head of the Government Communication and Information System, is increasingly reminding me of a mash-up of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the movie This Is Spinal Tap. I keep waiting for Manyi to say, “Forget tendencies — the media has elevendencies!” Because there seems to be a desire, Ã la the Spinal Tap amplifier that has a volume knob that goes up to 11, to ramp up the vitriol and doublespeak when it comes to portraying “the media” in South Africa.
We all know that “the media”, like “die swart gevaar“, “the Boer” and “Orlando Pirates”, are all false constructs created to make polemical points designed to push political agendas. But sometimes it’s easy to forget the insidious power of labels, unless you’re actually the foreign devil being kicked to death in Diepsloot. The more our government and business propagandists paint the media as the enemy, the easier it’s going to be for them to wriggle out of accountability.
And we know why the media has become the scapegoat. Partly it’s because “the government” (see what I did there?) hates having its flaws exposed. But primarily it’s because many media representatives are horrible, muckraking amateurs living in a world where readers seldom think beyond a headline. Oddly, though, the many loudmouths of government seem to be more concerned with newspapers that are professional and whose stories are well-researched and accurate exposés of the inevitable flaws in our democratic system. They just use bad journalism in a false synecdoche, allowing the mistakes of the inferior to be used to judge the superior (that’s us).
Now we all hate “the media”, because the media is the superego to our recently liberated rainbow id, to quote Frantz Freud, the famous post-colonial psychotherapist. The media is responsible for reining in our apparently structurally innate bent for corruption and in an irritatingly moralising way. But the recent meeting between Jimmy “The Man” Manyi and Sanef, the South African Nihilist Editors’ Forum, appears to be an object lesson in how not to deal with your superego. You can’t just shout it down.
As Twitter user @ferialhaffajee tweeted: “Jimmy Manyi said the meeting’s tone was robust, Sanef said it was rude. My view is we were dealing with amateurs.”
Personally, I would not want the task of having to communicate with a bunch of wankers whose job descriptions read “be a smart-ass with words”. Equally, I wouldn’t hire someone who thinks coloured people are a commodity to be exported to other provinces. The real issue seems to be Manyi’s statement, which I will now paraphrase out of context: “We’re only giving government’s R1-billion-a-year advertising money to media that also report on the boring good news of government, so sucks to you.”
Manyi seems to have forgotten that that’s taxpayers’ money, not his personal bribe stash.
Chris Roper is the editor of M&G Online. Follow him on Twitter @chrisroperza