Fight for Democracy. Glenda Daniels
profession.
Malema talked back. He refused identification with, or declined to appropriate, what Judith Butler had called ‘the injurious term’ (Schippers 2009: 78). He said he was just a ‘poor child’ and the media was jealous of him; he was not guilty of corruption and had nothing to hide from the South African Receiver of Revenue (SARS) (Sunday Independent: 28 February 2010). He also accused journalists of being opportunistic and having a conspiracy against him (The Times: 3 March 2010). The details of Malema’s corruption are not the focus for this discussion, but the fact that he was exposed and that there was the space for this to occur signalled something encouraging for the media’s role in this democracy. Malema also received a chance to talk back, via the media, when he claimed to be a poor child. What all this showed was the media playing the professional role according to the South African Press Code: ‘The primary purpose of gathering and distributing news and opinion is to serve society by informing citizens and enabling them to make informed judgments on the issues of the time, and, the freedom of the press allows for an independent scrutiny to bear on the forces that shape society’. There are shortcomings in the way the media operates, as noted by Cowling and Hamilton, and by Serino. For example, a lot is taken for granted and often not critically engaged with. There may be some self-importance. Nonetheless in playing this role, even in a less than perfect way, the media does hold power to account. (In my experience journalists can sometimes be lazy with a penchant for desiring ‘freebies’ more than they should. They can also be unethical but this is not commonplace. In June 2010, Ashley Smith, a Cape Argus journalist, admitted to having taken payment from Ebrahim Rasool, the former ANC provincial leader in the Western Cape, to write stories favourable to the ANC. The press body condemned this, made it a big story in the newspapers and broadcast media, and also condemned the fact that the government appeared to be going ahead with its plans to appoint Rasool to the US as ambassador.)
Through the Malema example we can witness how secrecy can obstruct democracy by keeping the public ignorant of important information. It can be argued that there is little secrecy in South Africa because the media appears to be loyal to its professional – although we don’t know how much is hidden, of course. Reconciliation of society (à la the theories of Žižek and Mouffe) that is, unity between the media and the ANC, seems impossible, and this is good news for the unrealised democracy. Moreover, as Johannsen, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, observed, ‘Secrecy obstructs democracy by keeping the public ignorant of information’.
NOTES
1Johannsen RC (1994) Military policies and the state system. In Held D (ed.) Prospects for Democracy: North South, East, West. Cambridge: Polity Press.
2Newspapers such as the Weekly Mail called themselves independent, not so much for being independent from political parties but for being commercially independent. In other words, they were not part of the big newspaper conglomerates (Perskor, Naspers, or the Argus Group), and were not profit driven.
3Tomaselli was quoting Mzala, a writer and radical within the ANC, who penned some of the ANC’s analysis, strategy and tactics.
3.
The media’s challenges: legislation and commercial imperatives
The Protection of Information Bill currently before Parliament is meant to replace an apartheid-era law dating from 1982 … it would virtually shield the government from the scrutiny of the independent press and criminalise activities essential to investigative journalism, a vital public service.1
This chapter first examines specifically how the legislative apparatus left over from the apartheid period hindered the work of journalists but remained because it suited the democratically elected leaders of the post-apartheid era. Then, it examines how the growing uses of technology, coupled with commercial imperatives, affect the media’s role in a democracy. The argument here is that these forms of subjection and interference have had a negative impact on the ‘free’ and ‘independent’ media. Then there is the raft of legislation that has an impact on journalism, and, specifically, the ANC’s efforts to promote and explain its insidious creation, the Protection of State Information Bill (Secrecy Bill) through which, as the US media body, the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in the opening quotation, the activities of the independent press would be criminalised while the government of the day would be shielded from scrutiny if this had to be enacted.
The chapter proceeds to an overview of the South African media, to provide details of how it has grown from a small and narrow set of players three decades ago to the more diverse, amorphous and fluid media landscape in the new dispensation – although it also shows the shifts from concentration of media ownership to fragmentation and then back again. The chapter then describes the legal conditions under which journalists have to operate and how, in some instances, the laws have changed to accommodate the free flow of information while, in others, the legislation is deliberately obstreperous: The Promotion of Access to Information Act of 2000, for example, stands in stark contrast to the Protection of State Information Bill, which went before Parliament in July 2010 and again in September 2010, then again in November 2010, and was then passed by the National Assembly in 2011 before amendments were made in May 2012, which included a public interest defence. But then these were withdrawn in June 2012.
The chapter then looks at commercial imperatives and new media and the impact this has had, and continues to have, on the world of traditional journalism. It also shows how the meaning of the term ‘media’ has changed – from the traditional sphere of television, radio and newspapers providing the public with information and a public sphere for debate and analysis, to a broader view that encompasses citizen journalism, blogging, online publishing, and social networking sites, as well as cellphone technology used to pass on news to fellow citizens and to the traditional media.
Nick Davies is a journalist at The Guardian newspaper in London. His 2009 book, Flat Earth News, which subjects the profession to critical scrutiny, argues that journalism has been short-changed throughout the world. Owing to subjection by commercial imperatives, newsrooms have been slashed to half their original size in some cases, and desk journalism (where reporters sit at their desks ‘dialing a quote’ rather than venturing out to the site of the scene or to interview someone personally) is all-pervasive. Journalists write more stories in less time, with no time to check the facts, and they often regurgitate press releases from public relations companies. It amounts to what Davies calls ‘churnalism’ (2009: 70), stories churned out mindlessly from press releases, with the deadline rather than the accuracy of the facts in mind. While Davies’s research is based primarily in the United Kingdom there are interesting overlaps with (and differences from) the situation in South Africa, as this chapter will show. Indeed, Anton Harber observes in the introduction to the book Troublemakers: The Best of South Africa’s Investigative Journalism (2010), edited jointly with Margaret Renn, that there has indeed been a juniorisation of newsrooms, with age and experience levels having dropped in the post-apartheid era. He argues, however, that this romanticises journalism under apartheid, suggesting that some unspecified universal high standard of journalism was set, while it is debatable that coverage was then more accurate or substantial. The chapter then turns to the South African media landscape, with a particular emphasis on newspapers, and examines concentration of ownership, state interventions, and commercial imperatives, arguing that these are all different kinds of pressures which, it can be argued, are subjections.
The South African media landscape: an unprogressive concentration of media therefore a lack of diversity?
The claim that there is too much concentration of media ownership necessarily means a lack of diversity and, in turn, a need for state intervention to curb media excesses is a spurious one. My argument expresses the contrary: that the media is amorphous and fluid, lacking in unity and cohesion, with as many opinions as there are journalists in a newsroom. There is no one ideological agenda in ‘the media’, and journalists, by and large, exercise agency and act within the codes and ethics of their profession.
The media grew significantly in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and again from 2000 to 2007. What the figures below highlight is the growth from a small, narrow field of operators to a broader more