Little difference between politicians and journalists

The relationship between politicians and journalists is, or rather ought to be, adversarial.

A politician is supposed to attempt to manage the public mind to get things done. This often means concealing what the politician really desires and deceiving the public into supporting him or her on mistaken grounds. The politician would argue, often quite truthfully, that, without the deception, nothing positive would get done.

A journalist is supposed to attempt to inform the public about what is really happening. The journalist is not supposed to want to get things done but rather to expose reality for the public good. The journalist exposes what the politician would rather see concealed. The journalist would argue, often quite rightly, that such concealment facilitates political corruption.

So it is not odd that journalist HL Mencken remarked that “the only way a journalist should look at a politician is down”, whereas politician Stanley Baldwin remarked that journalists seek “power without responsibility — the prerogative of the harlot”. These aphorisms confirm the nature of the adversarial relationship.

The trouble with these observations is that they bear little relationship to reality.

The politician is usually responsible first to self and second to party. Neither of these have much to do with the public whom the politician is supposed to serve. Therefore, the politician deceives the public to conceal the fact that the politician and the politician’s party are corrupt. The politician’s goal is usually to fulfil the demands of a pressure group, which is very often corrupt and concealed from the public. Hence the dishonesty involved is enormous, and the value of that dishonesty, if any, is very small.

The journalist is responsible first to self and second to employer, which is a media organisation that usually employed the journalist because the journalist shared its party political sympathies. No newspapers are politically independent and, because most newspapers are owned by oligarchs or huge corporations, most newspapers encourage their journalists to serve power. The journalists, especially in the tight job market of the declining media empires of today, naturally wish to please their bosses.

What is called fake news is produced by a combination of these two conditions. The politician constructs a false narrative, or communicates a false narrative constructed by patrons. The journalist, often influenced by the same patrons, either furthers that narrative if it corresponds to the bosses’ wishes, or demolishes it if it does not.

Even the demolition job must be done carefully. If the competing narrative of a political opponent is challenged effectively, the narratives of political allies or masters might be undermined.

For instance, in the United States supporters of the Democratic Party challenge the xenophobia promoted by President Donald Trump, but cannot be too specific about the details, because most of the policies and agencies Trump uses against immigrants were put in place by his Democratic predecessors.

In South Africa, there has always been an adversarial relationship between journalists and politicians who desire, or claim to desire, to undermine or overthrow the white capitalist oligarchy. (The exception was the National Party press at some points during the 20th century when it was going through its periodic anti-imperialist phases.)

Hence, journalists (with a few exceptions) attacked the ANC, the South African Communist Party and the United Democratic Front, until the UDF was disbanded and the ANC and the SACP were turned into the toy poms of plutocracy that they are now.

In contrast, journalists have treated the politicians favoured by corporate newspaper owners with immense respect and admiration, elevating monsters such as PW Botha, wastrels like Frederik van Zyl Slabbert and puppets like Mmusi Maimane to superstar status by suppressing their crimes and falsifying their accomplishments.

This works, however, only as long as the journalistic system works; that system being one in which a particular audience attends to a media outlet both uncritically and enthusiastically.

When people start to notice that media outlets tell lies and do not deserve enthusiasm, the system does not collapse all at once. People didn’t stop buying The Washington Post just because it became an open tool of the plutocracy. But institutional respect collapses — a collapse that has been fostered by journalists, who have campaigned to undermine state institutions that threatened their patrons (often using accurate evidence of corruption and incompetence in their campaign). Journalists in the West enjoy lower levels of trust than even politicians, and the two categories are less trusted than used-car salespeople.

This provides background to Adam Haupt’s attack on the Economic Freedom Fighters (“Malema and the like are no different from Trump”, January 25). This attack, which takes the form of a facile parsing of a few tweets combined with an uncritical regurgitation of anti-EFF propaganda, is motivated by his outrage about the EFF’s hostility to the press. (Such hostility ought to be healthy and the debate ought to be about whether the EFF’s hostility is illegitimately expressed.)

If Haupt was an honest commentator, he would address two obvious things: Does the EFF have grounds for this hostility? Obviously this is the case, since no other party has been smeared, vilified and denounced in the media (often without solid pretext) to the extent that the EFF has been.

Haupt’s article ignores this and, by ignoring it, Haupt makes himself part of the propaganda campaign. (This does not justify the EFF’s attacks on journalists but it suggests that the EFF has less to lose by such attacks than most parties; if the media is simply a gaggle of smear-sheets, there is no need to co-operate with them.)

The second is, given that the EFF is a populist movement (Haupt, like most ruling-class apologists, seems to believe that appealing to the people is evil), why should they attack journalists? Obviously, journalists must be unpopular for a seeker for easy public acclaim would not attack popular figures.

Although this is unsurprising, it should still be alarming. Unfortunately, because Haupt is making propaganda and therefore must pretend that journalists are truth-tellers, he cannot mention the issue and thus reveals his lack of integrity. — Mathew Blatchford, University of Fort Hare