Talkative Polity. Florence Brisset-Foucault
Beyond the specific case of Uganda, treatment of the media is often used as a yardstick to evaluate how “free” and “democratic” a political system is.18 The literature on the media in Africa has been particularly marked by this normative dimension.19 News outlets are often assessed according to how strongly they contribute to (or jeopardize) peace, development, and democracy. But this clearly does not do justice to the wealth of actions and representations by media professionals in these contexts.20 Indeed, the daily elaboration of media discourses illustrates particularly well the ambivalence and social thickness mentioned above.
Insisting on the ambivalence of the position of the media toward the state obviously does not mean denying how Ugandan journalists are exposed to multiple repressive acts on a day-to-day basis. These acts range from distressing threats and intimidation to traumatizing beatings, violent police searches, recurrent arrests, exhausting legal proceedings, and the like. They occur in particular when journalists reveal cases of corruption, or when they cover military operations, the first family, electoral fraud, or street protests. The valuable publications of the Human Rights Network for Journalists—Uganda give precise and gruesome details of these acts, and the aim of this book is not to paraphrase this very rich source.21 It is enough here to state that even if they mainly rely on self-reporting by victims (which means that estimates are probably low because of the very routine character of threats), these reports show an expansion in the acts of repression since the end of the 2000s, in a context of the normalization of torture used against opponents and suspects; of growing illegal, close-range electronic surveillance; and the complete impunity of the security services.22 Many Ugandan journalists describe a rise in repression and the systemic hostility of police and army against the media, especially when covering street protests and electoral campaigns. In 2009, the official response to the so-called “Buganda riots” was an important milestone in the repression of media speech, involving the closure of four radio stations and the ban of the ebimeeza. In 2011 and 2012, the coverage of the “Walk to Work” protests, organized by an opposition coalition against the cost of living, was particularly risky and difficult. Beyond these spectacular moments, political and business elites routinely use varied means to influence media speech. Journalists often mention in interviews how political pressure can take direct as well as indirect roads, especially through editors in chief, who can act both as fuses and conductors of repression. Pressure is also exerted by newspaper owners and advertisers. Criticizing the idea that there is a fundamental antagonism between media and state power does not mean that there are no power relations between the two, nor is such criticism understating the very real risks media workers take when expressing themselves. On the contrary, such criticism should lead to a better understanding of these risks and constraints.
Several methodological precautions need to be taken when it comes to analyzing repression and more precisely understanding the parameters of political rule. Repression originates from a great variety of sources. It is not systematic and can be attributed to several variables, though it is not anomic or random. It can be analyzed and trends can be interpreted to understand the kind of speech state elites are ready to tolerate and the means they have to implement limits, as well as their relationships with media workers and with other state agents.
Journalists suffer and respond to repression in diverse ways according to their resources, their positions within the newsroom, their social and political trajectories, and especially the links they might have with state elites, as well as their political ideas. They can put together protection and negotiation strategies, and more or less have leverage with the authorities. The daily process of negotiation does not exclude the use of violence; far from it. Links with state officials can be a source of pressure and protection.23 Previous friendships from school or church, the politics of exile, or sharing the experience of fighting in the Bush War that led Museveni to power between 1981 and 1986 does not completely prevent coercion. But these dynamics can attenuate it, while at the same time being a source of political and psychological pressure. A media worker may, for instance, be warned of an imminent arrest, or of the hostility of a particular official.24 Compliance and criticism are often closely intertwined. Sociologists have shown that the revelation of big scandals by the press, for example, is not a sign of detachment and autonomy, but rather a sign of the intensity of the relationships between media and state (via the access to good sources within it).25 As mentioned, the state is a competitive arena, where officials, as anywhere in the world, strategically use leaks to reach their objectives. Media workers and state officials have mutual interests in being close and interconnected.26
The daily bargaining between criticism and pressure leads to different kinds of compromise: for instance, the use of anonymity, the decisions made by journalists regarding whether or not to publish information, to push back the date of publication, to pass over information deemed too dangerous to foreign NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) or news outlets, or to get in touch directly and privately with state officials to raise an issue of concern.27 Some topics and official events are covered as a gesture of good faith toward state officials, with the goal that more controversial articles will be tolerated.28 Actually, newspaper pages can be read as palimpsests of such negotiations. The layout itself may reflect this, as one editor in chief noted: “Offending paragraphs [could be] sandwiched discreetly into the back page.”29 Articles might be moved from the “Politics” section to the less controversial “Business” pages. Black-and-white close-ups of frowning opponents may be preferred to wide-angle color photographs of political rallies showing the crowd.30 Metaphors and tales are, as elsewhere, widely used as a way to toy with repression.31
Degrees of submission and collusion vary within the newsroom, and according to topics and sections of the paper. This is why broad labels (“private press,” “state media,” “opposition media,” and “independent media”) are too general to help understand the nature of the relationship between state and media, the way domination is exercised and negotiated. Also, such labels do not capture the depth and complexity of the repertoires of critique and political languages deployed: editorial choices have to be analyzed against the backdrop of the plurality of power sources, together with a long and complex history of political ideas. Moreover, journalists position themselves not simply “for” or “against” the government: the range of possible positions is wider and more complex. Nicole Stremlau has shown well how during the first years of the regime, newspapers such as the New Vision (belonging to the government) and the Weekly Topic (owned privately by three major pillars of the NRM regime) participated in building a consensus around the new political order the NRM was attempting to build following the Bush War, while openly taking on a mission to criticize the regime in order to “strengthen the revolution.”32 These papers fiercely denounced corruption and abuse of power, and in order to do so journalists used the very ideals the NRM was supposed to protect.33 At the time, the way these journalists worked reflected a desire to be integrated within the political and moral renovation project of the NRM, while trying to protect themselves from repression: the state was an object of both desire and fear. Support and criticism could be intertwined within the same article, as a strategy of protection but also in coherence with political and ideological trajectories that were common between some journalists and NRM officials.
As mentioned earlier, repression is far from taking place only in visible ways. Official justification often hides the genuine reasons why repression is triggered in the first place. Nevertheless, these justifications are worth taking seriously for what they are: official representations of what legitimate media speech is, in the eyes of the political elite. Of interest here are the effects of this official ideology of discourse: how this ideology was perceived and sometimes taken on by journalists and citizens, and the influence it has had on actual political speech.
The definition of what can and what cannot be said has often been enforced by the state through extrajudicial violence, but also through criminal law. This started as early as 1986, even though criminal condemnations of journalists up until now have been extremely rare.34 But beyond criminal law, what is of interest to us here is that some journalists actively participated in crafting this new media language during the first ten years of the regime, including some who published very aggressive investigative pieces against