Fight for Democracy. Glenda Daniels
that the shifts are not for more liberalisation, nor for more democracy. Some of what has taken place between the media and the ANC signals a definite shift for tighter state control over the media. Duncan noted that the evolution of the ANC’s media policy was closely linked to the transformation of South Africa’s apartheid media and in the run-up to the 1994 elections the ANC ‘focused on the need to establish independent media institutions rather than to exert its own control over the media’. This culminated in the Media Charter. She pointed out that the ANC’s 49th and 50th conferences in 1994 and 1997 did not focus on media policy, suggesting that it was not a serious issue at the time.
A decade and a half after the ANC first discussed media policy, Duncan noted that there seemed in fact to be a swing back, from a focus on diversification to the desire for more state control.
Ambivalence
In its renewed call for a statutory media appeals tribunal in 2010, Point 58 of the ANC’s discussion document ‘Media transformation, ownership and diversity’, drafted in preparation for its National General Council (NGC) on 20-24 September 2010, stated that a ‘cursory scan of the print media reveals an astonishing degree of dishonesty, lack of professional integrity and lack of independence’. Yet research by Media Monitoring Africa (MMA), in a paper ‘The state of South Africa’s media’, presented to Sanef ’s Media Summit on 30 August 2010, showed that it would require a significant study involving a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods carried out across a substantial sample of media to prove the statement made by the ANC. William Bird, director of MMA, observed: ‘To then be able to make an informed claim to the extreme of, an “astonishing degree” would require a comprehensive study and not a “cursory glance”. To our knowledge a comprehensive study of this nature has not been carried out in South Africa. No evidence for these claims is presented in the document’ (MMA 2010). The MMA’s research found in its survey of election coverage, for instance, that eighty-four per cent of stories were fair, without any bias towards any political party, while the media’s role during the 2010 World Cup was to encourage social cohesiveness and was overwhelmingly positive. The ANC’s arguments that the media needed control because of its ‘false reporting’, ‘irresponsible reporting’ and ‘consistent anti-ANC bias’ was belied by the small number of complaints to the ombudsman by the ANC and government officials in the previous year (ending August 2010) about stories published – twenty-four out of tens of thousands.
On the other hand, according to the ombudsman, four stories about the ANC or ANC Youth League were found to be unfair or inaccurate in the past three years, from eight complaints lodged (Sunday Times: 29 August 2010). That is a fifty per cent success rate for articles taken to the ombudsman by the ANCYL.
The ANC and the SACP’s calls for a media appeals tribunal did not remain static before the September 2010 NGC. Blade Nzimande, the SACP general secretary and minister of higher education, and one of the main proponents within the alliance calling for curbs on the print media’s excesses, did an about-turn after the party’s Central Committee meeting in Johannesburg on 30 August 2010. He announced that a media appeals tribunal should not be used for pre-publication censorship, and should not be appointed by parliament, but from a range of representative structures from society, to guard against political manipulation (Nzimande 2010b). Cosatu’s general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, announced the week before the SACP’s about-turn that the media appeals tribunal would be a refuge for the corrupt and the federation would not support it (Mail & Guardian: 27 August-2 September 2010). While Cosatu’s view on an independent media could be seen to be consistent, as there was no history or evidence of the workers federation hailing the media as ‘enemies of the people’, the SACP’s about-turn showed ambivalence. For example, just three weeks earlier, Nzimande had stated that the media was a threat to democracy: ‘If there is one serious threat to our democracy, it is a media that is accountable to itself … we have no opposition other than the bourgeois media’ (The Times: 2 August 2010). In another, more glaring, example Pallo Jordan wrote that ‘the value we place on a free media, independent and outspoken press in democratic South Africa cannot be overstated … I cannot imagine an ANC government that is fearful of criticism’ (The Times: 20 August 2010) yet announced in a press conference on 24 September that the ANC had adopted a resolution to forge ahead with the media appeals tribunal and said it was an example of the ANC’s ‘commitment to press freedom’ (see Appendix 2 for the resolution adopted). And in October he told the Pan African Parliament that the media was not reflecting the transition to democracy (Sunday Independent: 24 October 2010). There most certainly is ambivalence, but is there a fetishistic split too? Kay explained the fetishistic split in Žižek’s theorising, using his example of Tony Blair: ‘We voted for Tony Blair in Britain because he is deceitful and a master of spin, even though we also believe he is sincere’ (2003). The fetishistic split that ensured his success ran something like this: ‘We believe he is upright and moral, but all the same, we know he is scheming and underhand and thus can be relied upon not to change things much, though he may make the status quo work a bit better’. How can we apply this to the media and the ANC in South Africa? We can do so simply by suggesting that the ANC believes in media freedom and supports it, as it states frequently, but that it wants a media appeals tribunal anyway, because it is insecure and afraid of press freedom. While this split might not be so obvious at this stage in the book, what is clear is that there was ambivalence.
The ANC’s gaze on the media displays an ambivalence which also characterises the swings in Žižek’s theories. For example, in The Sublime Object of Ideology Žižek argues, from a fairly liberal perspective, for freedom, while in his later work, Did Somebody say Totalitarianism? (2002a), he argues for more state intervention and control which limit democracy. His theoretical ambivalence reflects the lived experience of confusion and ambivalence reflected in the ANC’s approach to freedom of expression and democratic culture. A possible explanation for the ambivalence is the history of democratic centralism embedded both in Žižek’s theoretical background as an intellectual and in the ANC’s past as an underground organisation marked by Soviet Marxist influences. This is the undecided nature of the ANC today, as it is the undecided nature of Žižek’s theoretical framework – both with one foot in a Stalinist past and the other in liberal democracy. Before delving too deeply into psychoanalysis and exploring the relationship between the idea of democracy as a floating signifier (without fixed meaning to ‘democracy’) and an independent press in South Africa, we need first to turn to the origins of democracy and democratic theory in order to understand its varied manifestations historically.
History of democracy
David Held, tracing models of democracy, cited the political ideals of Athens as ‘equality among citizens, liberty, respect for the law and justice’ (1994: 16). The Athenian city state was ruled by citizen-governors, while citizens were at the same time subjects and creators of public rules and regulations. Citizens are intrinsic to democracy, but not all people are citizens and this was true for Athens as much as for modern forms of democracy. So Aristotle was not a citizen as he was from elsewhere. Women were not citizens either, nor were certain categories of ‘commoner’. Direct democracy, Held commented, encompassed the idea that citizens could fulfill themselves through involvement in the polis, a commitment to civic virtue towards the common good, in an intertwining of the public and the private, as he argued in a later work (2006).
Still, not all were included in the original ‘democratic’ project. Women and slaves, for example, were excluded from citizenship. While some theorists still insist on dating democracy to the Athenians, and maintain that democracy is as old as the hills – over 2 500 years old – it was clearly not real democracy because of its exclusion of aspects of society, or its elitist and sexist nature. Women and slaves combined would have made up more than half the population during Athenian ‘democracy’. Democracy has travelled a significant journey towards greater inclusiveness since then, according to Dahl (1998: 43) but the journey is not over. For many post-structuralist theorists: Derrida, Mouffe, Laclau, Butler and Žižek, the journey can never end, hence this framework, which supports radical democracy.
Mouffe elucidated in The Democratic Paradox that the commonest trend, and the most talked about model of democracy was the deliberative democratic