Don’t blame media for broken state

President Jacob Zuma with the media. If the ANC engaged the media, based not on gut, but evidence, its gripes could be taken seriously, the writer says. Photo: Elmond Jiyane, Department of Communications

President Jacob Zuma with the media. If the ANC engaged the media, based not on gut, but evidence, its gripes could be taken seriously, the writer says. Photo: Elmond Jiyane, Department of Communications

Published May 25, 2015

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Instead of getting on its old hobby horse, the ANC would do better to focus on good governance, writes Eusebius McKaiser.

The ANC must stop attacking the media and rather focus on running the country better. When the party’s not lecturing journalists about what questions to ask, and what questions not to ask, it repeats assertions about the media being “oppositional”, and having an agenda.

The latest such example, of course, is the claim that the Daily Dispatch has an agenda against the party. The party regularly claims that most media houses are hell-bent on bringing down the ANC-led government. These claims are unpersuasive and, even if true, best dealt with by demonstrating governance excellence rather than rehearsing hostility.

I really do not know who exactly “the media” refers to. What I do know is that our country has many media companies, each with a range of media products, and that a diverse group of reporters, columnists, contributing writers, and editorial teams, look after the content of these media houses. If the ANC is to be believed, then our media products should be indistinguishable.

But that is nonsense. The content and tonal differences between our radio stations, for example, are stark. Not only are there massive station-level differences between, say 702, Kaya FM, Umhlobo Wenene, Jozi FM, Jacaranda, SAfm and Radio Sonder Grense, but content and tonal differences also exist within these stations, depending on who and when you tune into a particular station.

Newspapers differ less starkly, but are certainly not homogenous. The Sowetan, Business Day and The Star, for example, do not have one narrative. They have different readerships and their story choices and angles reporters typically choose are influenced by the different stakeholders and readerships of these newspapers. And even then, individual reporters, contributors and columnists differ in respect of the issues they pick and the angles they judge, individually, as the most salient on any given day.

These differences also apply to television stations in our country, as well as the vibrant online and new media platforms that are thriving these days. So, any ANC criticism that speaks about “the media” is at best lazy – because the phrase is broad and vague – and at worst, motivated by dishonesty – the aim being to have a chilling effect on everyone in “the media”, hoping that it could then secure more positive or palatable coverage of the party and the state.

I don’t deny that one can talk about patterns of reporting. But given that media independence is crucial to the health of any democracy, criticism from the ANC should be anchored in robust evidence and not in anecdote or gut. ANC criticisms are seldom anchored in credible research about patterns of reporting.

And such research does sometimes surface. University of Johannesburg’s Professor Jane Duncan has done well to expose how reporting on horrific events like the Marikana Massacre, for example, often shows systematic bias in favour of big business, and even the state, and crowding out the viewpoints and stories of workers.

Some media houses have done better than others to internalise this report, and correct the imbalances with, for example, subsequent documentaries that tell the story of Marikana from the viewpoint of everyone implicated in this dark stain on our democracy.

In 2008, an excellent Media Monitoring Africa report – “Crime according to Beeld: Fear in Black and White” – into the coverage of crime by Beeld showed, for example, that there was, at the time, a systematic distorting by the newspaper of who crime’s victims were. The newspaper, whether deliberate or unwittingly, had told crime stories that would give an outsider the false impression that only white South Africans are routinely crime victims in our country.

If the ANC engages the media, not based on gut, but on this kind of evidence, then it would be easier to take its gripes seriously. But that isn’t typically what the party does. All we invariably hear is ideological sloganeering such as Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande’s obsession with calling the media “liberal”. And why “liberal” should be a bad thing, by the way, I still do not know.

But if, for argument’s sake, the media do fail to tell the story of this ANC government in a fair or balanced manner, what should the ANC do? The best tactic, frankly, is simply to get on with demonstrating excellence in how it governs. I cannot see how a newspaper can have credibility with the majority of South Africans if it wilfully distorts reality. So instead of getting irritated by a media that it essentially then regards as trolling the ANC, why not take comfort in ordinary people’s ability to separate truth from fiction?

Since journalism that lacks credibility cannot thrive commercially for long, one must be wary of the ANC’s obsession with the media’s oversight role. The reason’s simple I suspect: It’s easier to hate a newspaper for exposing poorly run hospitals in East London, or corrupt tender processes that deprive the community of proper sanitation, than it is fixing a broken state.

* Eusebius McKaiser is the best-selling author of A Bantu In My Bathroom and Could I Vote DA? A Voter’s Dilemma.

** The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Independent Media.

The Star

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