Many people do not know the implications of the Bill, but when they do, they state unequivocally that they want less secrecy in society, not more. They want a free flow of information so that they can make informed decisions about their lives. In March 2012, a further postponement was announced, and only seventeen of the 263 written submissions were approved for presentation to the parliamentary committee. The parliamentary committee heard oral submissions on 29 March 2012, and when it was Mark Weinberg from the Alternative Information Development Centre and the Right2Know’s turn, he was ordered to stop, because he was making ‘political statements’ (Sunday Times: 1 April 2012). He was expelled after he submitted that there was a ‘rise of conservative authoritarianism’ and a ‘rise of the securocrats’ in the post-Polokwane dispensation. Weinberg said his ejection was more evidence of the ‘undemocratic culture gripping our government’.
My argument is that the ANC is obsessed about the print media and its numerous uncoverings of corruption within the party’s ranks. These exposés destroy the image the ANC would like to portray of itself as the noble liberation movement. It summoned two outrageously undemocratic ‘solutions’ to deal with the ‘problem’. Under the guise of ‘development’, ‘transformation’, ‘rights to dignity’, and maybe even ‘the second transition’ there is something highly ideological and seriously political afoot: the desire for political control through curbs on access to information. This argument proceeds that the ANC does not want the party’s internal divisions and problems hung out for the public to see; it does not want the inadequacy of service delivery exposed; and it finds the corruption within its ranks embarrassing.
Legislative curbs and muzzling would spell doom for democracy but nonetheless, alongside the gloomy picture there are civil society forces rallying against this authoritarianism creeping in to steal democracy. As Nic Dawes, editor of the Mail & Guardian, aptly wrote in his end-of-year freedom essay: ‘It is a fragile creature, and new, but the ANC’s fear and rage may be giving birth to a politics more threatening to its hegemony than any lurid caricatures of its paranoiac imagination’ (Mail & Guardian: 23 December 2011-5 January 2012).
In its attempts to cover up its own failings, the ruling party uses obfuscation and some serious ideological social fantasies, and projects many of its internal problems onto a robust press. For this reason, I have employed psychoanalytical concepts such as hysteria, fantasy, gaze, surplus and excess to explain the issues in the various case studies that have occurred since the advent of democracy. While democracy is fragile, there are optimistic moments lying side by side with pessimistic moments. The ultimate point is that a critical and robust press plays a significant role in keeping the spaces open for the deepening of democracy and it must be left alone to do its job.
ABREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS
| ANC | African National Congress |
| ANCYL | ANC Youth League |
| BEE | black economic empowerment |
| BDFM | Business Day/Financial Mail |
| Cosatu | Congress of South African Trade Unions |
| DA | Democratic Alliance |
| FBJ | Forum of Black Journalists |
| FXI | Freedom of Expression Institute |
| GEAR | Growth, Employment and Redistribution |
| Idasa | Institute for Democracy in South Africa |
| IPS | Inter Press Service News Agency |
| Misa | Media Institute of South Africa |
| MMA | Media Monitoring Africa |
| NCOP | National Council of Provinces |
| NAIL | New African Investments Limited |
| PFC | Press Freedom Commission |
| SABC | South African Broadcasting Corporation |
| SACP | South African Communist Party |
| SAHRC | South African Human Rights Commission |
| Sanef | South African National Editors’ Forum |
| TAC | Treatment Action Campaign |
1. INTRODUCTION
The ANC and the media post-apartheid
Gratitude for liberation should not mean unending gratitude to the leading movement in that process. It is very human to be caught in the seductive embrace of one’s liberators, but it is irresponsible and shirking one’s duty to continue to entrust the future of one’s society solely to a party or parties associated with the liberation struggle.1
The role of the news media in South Africa’s democracy presents a paradox, a historically created conundrum: the South African media finds itself subjected to the ruling party’s desire for more unity and consensus in the country’s fractured society. The desire of the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC) would be met if there was a more supportive and loyal press but the press finds compliance with this desire out of kilter with its professional code of ethics, its role of holding power to account, loyalty to the citizenry, exposing abuses of power and being a ‘watchdog’ in the unfolding democracy. The historically created conundrum consists of the ‘logic’ that because the ANC led the liberation struggle and was democratically elected it deserves a more sympathetic press. But as Mamphela Ramphele has noted in the opening quotation to this chapter, it would be irresponsible to be ‘caught in the embrace of one’s liberators’, and then arguably in support of a media independent from political control she averred that ‘we must guard against the closing of the mind and inward turning of the gaze that leads to tyranny … We need to know how open our society is so that we have a yardstick against which to measure South Africa’s progress in creating an open society.’ Since 1994, prominent members of the ANC have, to varying degrees, conceptualised the media as an ‘us and them’, or in a matrix which positions the media as outside democracy. Yet the tensions are internal to, and inherent in, democracy itself.
This opening chapter provides an introduction which is thematically grounded in political philosophy. In their 1985 work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argued that democracy is secured precisely through its resistance to realisation, a foundational point which has been accepted by the key political philosophical works of the three authors whose perspectives have guided this book: Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler and Chantal Mouffe. Laclau and Mouffe stated that the different political spaces, and the plurality of such spaces, are part and parcel of the deepening of a democratic order. Within this multiplicity of open spaces there are contestations, changing meanings and constant flux. Difference, rather than unity of opinion, is therefore necessary in any democratic transition. Dissension should be accepted, and those who criticise should be viewed as legitimate adversaries rather than as enemies. This is how a radical democracy is generated, according to Mouffe in The Democratic Paradox. One of my central arguments is that the media is one such space or platform for a diversity of views but, even more importantly, it is a medium for the questioning of meaning in politics. Running through this book is the thread that journalists are not ‘enemies of the people’ or outsiders
