Even though the independent media understood its role as that of a watchdog, holding power to account to prevent the graphic and dramatic scenario that Cosatu’s Zwelinzima Vavi painted of a corrupt predator state full of political hyenas; and even though the media understood it should remain separate from the ruling party, the state, and the government, it nevertheless, under the auspices of the SA National Editors’ Forum [Sanef], believed in engagement with the ANC-led government.
It gave the ANC the benefit of the doubt.
On October 15 and 16, 2010, government representatives and Sanef met at the Mount Grace Hotel, in the Magaliesberg hills, to discuss problems with the media and how to defuse hostilities.
After the two-day summit, the deputy president, Kgalema Motlanthe, announced that the ANC would give the media a chance to review and strengthen its self-regulatory mechanism before forging ahead – if it did at all – with a state-regulated media appeals tribunal.
This seemed to go directly against the ANC’s National General Council (NGC) resolution of September 2010, less than a month earlier of the same year, which tasked Parliament with an investigation into setting up the tribunal.
According to the deputy president, the government would also make submissions to the SA Press Council’s review process about the functioning of the press ombudsman’s office.
Motlanthe said “a lot” depended on how the government’s concerns would be addressed.
The concerns he raised were the turnaround time for printing corrections and the commensurate importance of the prominence given to apologies.
If these were put right it could remove the basis for disquiet.
At first glance this appeared to be an about-turn from the NGC decision, but it is not necessarily the case.
An about-turn would be a superficial interpretation. It should rather be seen as a classic example of the ANC alliance showing its many ideological strands, as well as its fractious and split nature.
Some within the cabinet, such as Motlanthe, had stronger democratic tendencies, as did some within the alliance such as Vavi of Cosatu, who had spoken out against a media appeals tribunal and the Protection of State Information Bill.
This stood in stark contrast to the Stalinist tendencies of Blade Nzimande of the SACP, Julius Malema of the ANC Youth League and Jackson Mthembu of the ANC.
Sanef released a statement agreeing that “improved relations between the government and the media were critical to the achievement of the SA envisaged in the country’s constitution”.
This agreement gave the independent print media some breathing space from possible foreclosures.
But it remained to be seen which ideological tendency would win in the end. Ultimately, based on the fact that the government did not stipulate any timeframe for the review process of the self-regulatory mechanism of the media, it would seem that the ANC’s 2012 policy conference would decide.
Two days after the government-Sanef summit, on October 19, 2010, campaigners from the Right2Know organisation engaged in a silent march to Constitution Hill in Braamfontein to mark Black Wednesday – the day in 1977 when the apartheid government shut down The World newspaper and adopted a more draconian approach towards the media.
Some striking issues emerged from the Black Wednesday commemoration.
First, some Sanef members, who negotiated with the government about the freedom of the press, were enthusiastic afterwards (for example, Thabo Leshilo, who chaired the session, said: ‘I left the meeting largely enthused. We seem to be going in the right direction,’ more than hinting that he believed [in] the good faith of the meeting).
Second, the editor of the Financial Mail, Barney Mthombothi, felt that whether or not the media appeals tribunal was instituted “the damage is done” and that some leaders in Africa were saying “look at what is happening in South Africa, yet you are complaining”.
The proposed repressive measures to curb the media’s freedom in South Africa were being used in other African states to justify their lack of media freedom – if curbs on media freedom were happening in SA, a shining beacon of democracy and freedom of expression, how could citizens elsewhere protest?
One of the panellists at a Wits commemoration, a former editor of Sowetan, and Avusa ombudsman, Joe Latakgomo, drew on his experience from apartheid days to sketch parallels about press freedom in the democratic era.
He remembered how his newspaper – The World – was closed down in 1977 and how, prior to that, journalists were not allowed to tell the truth.
He made direct links with the ANC’s attempted subjections of 2010.
He asked: “Should Sanef be meeting the government about media freedom? Would it really make a difference?”
Latakgomo felt the government and the ANC would, in the end, simply do what they wanted to do.
He considered that the proposals for the enactment of the Protection of State Information Bill and for instituting the media appeals tribunal were intended to intimidate journalists and to make them feel guilty about their legitimate work.
This raised the following questions: Would journalists start to turn towards the voice of power? Would they begin to self-censor? Would they feel that they were doing something wrong by reporting corruption and the abuse of power?
Latakgomo hinted that this stepping backwards could already be happening, given the many advertisements in the newspapers calling for a review of self-regulation.
Latakgomo thought that the self-regulation system worked well as it was.
He was convinced that the repressive moves by the ANC and the ruling alliance were repeated patterns of the past, that this was a case of an insecure government shutting down the dissenting voices of civil society.
It seemed that the ANC’s anti-media stance was part of a wider and broader antipathy related to any criticism and dissension, which highlighted the ruling party’s own insecurity.
It was an insecurity bordering on hysteria in the last few months of 2010.
So it was within this context, the all-pervasive fear, hysteria, insecurity and paranoia of the ruling party, that Latakgomo’s analysis made sense.
He warned that the ruling bloc would continue to “swing the sword above the heads” of journalists and editors, and it was not going to stop, even after the review process of the self-regulatory mechanism was completed.
Barely a week after Latakgomo’s predictions, police threatened to arrest two journalists from the Eastern Cape on October 22 in connection with an anonymous letter threatening the safety of a cabinet minister.
The journalists said they felt threatened when police warned them that what had happened in Mpumalanga could happen in the Eastern Cape.
After the intimidation of the two Eastern Cape journalists, Sanef chairman Mondli Makhanya observed that the behaviour of the police appeared to violate the agreement reached between the government and the media that consultation between the government and Sanef was necessary before a subpoena was issued for a journalist to give evidence.
It could be argued by a cynic that the incident vindicated the view that Sanef might have been naive in putting so much faith in its negotiations with the government, or turning towards the voice of power.
Had the green light been given to the courts that secrecy was the order of the day, even though the enactment of the Protection of State Information Bill had not yet occurred?
In another incident, after the government-media summit, a Pretoria High Court judge, Judge Ephraim Makgoba, granted an interdict to the SAPS to stop the publication of details of corruption in the police’s crime intelligence unit in the Sunday Independent of October 31, 2010.
The court backed the police to interdict Independent Newspapers from publishing the full story of nepotism and corruption by keeping names secret.
If the independent media continued to pursue openness, the codes of the profession, and remained loyal to their task of holding power to account, as in the case of the Sunday Independent, whose then-editor, Makhudu Sefara (now the editor of The Star), stated that he intended fighting the gagging in the Constitutional Court, it would be unlikely that the ANC alliance or the government would accept the self-regulation review process by the media.
It was more likely that they would continue to be unhappy with the uncovering of corruption, using ideological labels and obfuscation that this was “anti-transformation”.
Two more turns took place after the Sanef-government summit.
First, Zuma announced during a rally to mark the 66th anniversary of the ANC Youth League in Stellenbosch on October 30, 2010, that he was still committed to the media appeals tribunal, and this emerged a mere two weeks after the government-Sanef summit at which his deputy president had announced that the tribunal was on ice until the self-regulatory review process had taken place.
Second, the government announced a plan to channel advertising to “patriotic media” and aimed to allocate 60 percent of spending to the SABC and 30 percent to The New Age.
The fight between the ANC and the media for democracy, a fight internal to democracy itself, was characterised by contradictions and unpredictable twists and turns.
Foucault’s famous reflection said: “Don’t ask me who I am, I am constantly changing.”
So it is with SA’s Zeitgeist. It changes day by day.
l This is an edited extract from Glenda Daniels’s book Fight for Democracy (Wits University Press). Daniels is a journalist and senior researcher at the Wits journalism department.