was Essop Pahad, formerly minister in Mbeki’s presidency and subsequently publisher and editor of The Thinker, who said in a speech at a colloquium at Wits University, Media Freedom and Regulation, on 15 September 2010, that the ANC found the way ‘the Info Bill and the Media Tribunal was being linked is hysterical’.
8In Contingency, Hegemony and Universality Žižek explains the famous Marx brothers joke about ‘coffee or tea?’. ‘Yes, please!’ It is a refusal of choice.
2.
The relationship between the media and democracy
Secrecy obstructs democracy by keeping the public ignorant of information that it needs to make wise policy choices.1
This chapter argues that the media is a legitimate adversary – rather than an enemy of the people – in a fluid, changing and unrealised imperfect democracy. The ‘free’ press (and ‘free’ is used here in the sense of free from political interference, control and state intervention, not from economic, cultural or social interference) poses something of a challenge to the ruling alliance’s hegemonic discourse, with its desire to limit the polymorphic voices of a diverse media.
A dissonance has crept in between the Constitution’s ascription to independence of the media on the one hand and the government and state’s actions on the other, creating tension in the relationship between the media and the ANC. One of the ANC’s main problems with the media is what it conceives as inadequate and negative representation of its views as the ruling party. For example, at the launch of the ANC’s online publication ANC Today in 2001, the ‘Letter from the President’ noted:
Historically the national and political constituency represented by the ANC has had very few and limited mass media throughout the ninety years of its existence. During this period, the commercial newspaper and magazine press representing the views, values and interests of the white minority has dominated the field of the mass media. This situation has changed only marginally in the period since we obtained our liberation in 1994 (ANC Today: 26 January-1 February 2001).
One of the issues raised throughout this book is the compulsion of these discursive interventions, which are in many respects inappropriate to a constitutional democracy. While tension between the ruling party and the media is not a recent development, it became increasingly pronounced during the first decade of the new millennium and at the ANC National Policy Conference in Polokwane in December 2007 when a media appeals tribunal to regulate the media was proposed. This occurred against the backdrop of the ANC wanting a media which would act in the ‘national interest’, one which would reconcile conflicting interests towards national consensus. In July 2010 it was announced that the Gupta Group, which was closely linked to President Zuma, would fund a daily national newspaper, The New Age, which was due to launch in mid-September 2010 (Business Day: 6 July 2010). By mid September 2010 the paper had not launched, citing technical difficulties with the new technological systems from India, and a new date for the end of October 2010 was set. The paper launched on 6 December 2010 after a few shaky starts.
Although the main player behind the paper, Essop Pahad, denied that the paper would be affiliated to the ANC, it was clear that it would in fact be more than sympathetic. For example, the editor, Vuyo Mvoko, in an interview on Radio 702 on 23 July 2010, said: ‘We will show the positive side of government; it cannot be that our nation is just about crime and corruption’.
The struggle for freedom of the press from state control was a continuous one during the apartheid years, which culminated with press freedom becoming firmly entrenched and encapsulated in the 1996 Constitution. In 2005, South Africa received a favourable rating on a renowned international free press scale from Reporters without Borders, and was ranked thirty-first in the worldwide Press Freedom Index. But by October 2007 it was ranked forty-third on the same index, lower than Mauritius (twenty-fifth), Namibia (twenty-sixth) and Ghana (twenty-ninth).
In October 2007, editors gathered through Sanef to hold the third Media and Society Conference at which the independence of the media from political control was discussed. This took place thirty years after Black Wednesday, 19 October 1977, the day the apartheid government banned The World and The Weekend World newspapers, together with nineteen black organisations, and detained journalists, editors and anti-apartheid activists.
During the apartheid years there were three distinct streams of media. The mainstream media was made up, first, of the national broadcaster, and, second, of the English and Afrikaans language newspaper blocs (Jacobs 1999), a duopoly split between the Afrikaans conglomerates Naspers and Perskor and the English conglomerates South African Associated Newspapers and Argus Holdings. A third stream existed too, an independent or alternative press, consisting of smaller print publications such as the Weekly Mail, Vrye Weekblad, South and New Nation.2 The first two streams had very different approaches to reporting on the government of the day. The mainstream media tended either to toe the government line ideologically or to support the then whites-only opposition party (Berger 1999; Tomaselli and Muller 1989; Steenveld 2007; Hadland 2007b). Any criticism of the government was in the context of accepting the status quo and voiced from within the confines of that status quo. The English language newspapers tended to take a liberal perspective that criticised certain aspects of the apartheid policies, but in a way that did not challenge the status quo outright. The role of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) and Afrikaans language newspapers was much more obvious – to support the National Party government and its policies. During this time the voices of the majority, the oppressed, were seldom heard via the mainstream media, and outright dissent was rare. Although there were newspapers and radio stations aimed at black South Africans, these tended to have little impact on the perceptions of those in power. Except for the ‘alternative or independent press’, the net effect was that the bulk of the media did little to challenge apartheid. In essence, the South African mainstream media promoted apartheid and the government supported the mainstream commercially driven media.
Nonetheless, the role the media played during apartheid is an uneven one. There were also instances of exposures of corruption of the ruling class and brutality from police and prisons. Over and above the prohibition of information that came from the banning of political opponents and the general milieu of repression, the National Party government also introduced a host of legislative acts at various times during its rule that affected the media either directly or indirectly, creating an environment that controlled the information reaching the public and violated freedom of the press. Between 1950 and 1990 over a hundred laws were introduced to regulate the activities of the South African media. The most prominent was the Publications Act of 1974 (Durrheim et al 2005), outlining the rules and regulations imposed by the state on the media. According to Steenveld (2007), three acts ensured the political climate of media repression: the Internal Security Act of 1982 which prohibited the circulation and debate of ideas relating to alternative social and political policies for South Africa; the Protection of Information Act of 1982 which prohibited the obtaining of forbidden information and its disclosure to any foreign state or hostile organisation; and the Registration of Newspapers Act of 1982, which gave the press the option of falling under the Directorate of Publications (the state censorship machinery) or subjecting themselves to self-regulation under the Media Council.
In addition to the constraints imposed on the media by the political climate, economic imperatives and ownership of the media also affected its role and independence. Until 1990 the concentration of print media ownership in the hands of one or two conglomerates also acted as a threat to media independence. William Gumede (2005: 3-4) was one of the academics arguing that it was necessary to include financial independence, not just political independence, in any discussion of democracy and media freedom. For him, although there has been a proliferation of new newspapers and radio stations throughout South Africa since the inception of democracy, often as a result of the interplay between old and new technology, the real danger in the media being free to report as it sees
