signifier, which denotes that it does not have full meaning (a ‘signifier’ is more than a mere sign but stands for, or represents, the subject – and a floating signifier, then, is a signifier with no fixed meaning).
The intersection between the independent media (that is, the news media – journalism, news reporting, analysis and political commentary) and democracy in an unrealised democracy is under scrutiny, the aim of which is to preserve the ideal of democracy, to ward off dissolution, and also hopefully to inform action or activism to halt the whittling away of the ‘free’ space of the media (by ‘free’, here, is meant relatively free, relatively autonomous and relatively independent, with the focus on relative freedom from political pressures and state interference).
The South African media professes to play a vital role in entrenching the articles of the Constitution, ensuring a transparent democracy which holds public officials accountable for their decisions and actions and exposes the abuse of power and corruption by ruling elites. The questions are to do with the concept of democracy and its realisation; the tension between the two constitutive dimensions of democracy; and the realisation of the popular will – particularly pressing in South Africa with its history of apartheid racism, class divisions, growing poverty, unemployment, and failures of service delivery, especially to poor people.
According to Mouffe (2006: 974), in a ‘radical pluralist democracy’ the media can be gate-openers rather than gate-closers. Her model of democracy not only allows for theorising the increase of pluralism within journalism, but also allows for the increase of pluralism through journalism. In South Africa, as in many other parts of the world, the media does not exist as a fixed, homogeneous entity. Although organisational forums and non-governmental and academic bodies (such as the South African National Editors Forum (Sanef), the Forum for Black Journalists (FBJ), the Media Institute of Southern Africa (Misa), the Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI), Media Monitoring Africa, Institute for the Advancement of Journalism and Wits Journalism) enable representatives of the media to share ideas, debate professional issues and even outline codes of conduct, the media in South Africa does not share a collective or unitary identity.
Different forces drive editorial content, from the diverse theoretical platforms from which journalists operate to the different economic and political agendas of the media owners and managers. The South African media is fractured, open-ended and undecided in its nature. It is for this reason that I have chosen to use a radical democratic perspective, coupled with a blend of Žižekean psychoanalysis, which goes beyond the liberal democratic paradigm. In Žižek’s conceptual analysis, especially in his 1989 work The Sublime Object of Ideology, a postmodern twist is that of the Master-Signifier. The Master-Signifier could be described as a ‘quasi transcendental big other’. Through imaginary and symbolic identification we see ourselves in how we are seen by that ‘big other’. But as there is no ‘big other’, the Master-Signifier is empty, a signifier that puts an end to the chain of meaning. As Kay (2003: 159) has stated, the idea that there is an other of the other is psychotic; this is why we need to discover that the big other does not exist, that it is ‘merely an imposter … lacking or inconsistent as a result of its deficient relation to the real.’
The question is, if the media is not independent and free to criticise, what is the intersection between democracy and an independent press? A critical question is, first, how the ANC ‘sees’ the media vis-à-vis democracy. (I refer here to the ANC’s ‘gaze’, the lens of which one is part and which therefore prevents one from seeing from an objective distance – one’s own view is subscribed in the content of one’s gaze.) To use a personal example, my gaze, having worked all my adult life as a journalist, is inscribed in this book’s gaze on the media.
A second question, pointed out by Mondli Makhanya, then editor of the Sunday Times, in a 2008 interview, is how, in contrast to the ANC’s view, journalists view their role and seek not to be ‘ideologically in tandem’ with the ruling party. A third question follows, then, as to how attempts are made by the ruling bloc to unify society via foreclosures, and whether the media succumbs to the ideological interpellations2 or ‘turns’ from the attempt at subjugation. Are the attempts to quilt or unify society via a point de capiton, a tight knot of meanings (Žižek, 1989: 95-100)3 succeeding through the interpellations of the media? These are the key questions. While the book’s focus is on the relationship of the ANC and the media vis-à-vis democracy in post-apartheid South Africa, I also discuss and trace the ANC’s stance on the media prior to its becoming the ruling party. In 2010 three significant events took place which, it could be argued, highlighted the greatest tension in the democratic dispensation between the media and the ANC. The three events in 2010 that related to threatened closure of spaces for media freedom were: first, the desire of the ANC for a statutory media appeals tribunal became quite intense; second, the Protection of State Information Bill (dubbed the Secrecy Bill) which, in its 2010 form, would have created a secretive society and criminalised investigative journalism and whistle-blowers was on the table; and third, the arrest of the journalist Mzilikazi wa Afrika of the Sunday Times on 4 August 2010 for ‘fraud and defeating the ends of justice’ which raised concerns about state bullying (The Times: 5 August 2010). These events signified the unprogressive hegemonising of society by the ANC. The reaction of the media, according to the ANC, was ‘hysterical’ (used as a psychoanalytical concept signifying paranoia and obession). In October 2010, the country dropped five places in the Reporters without Borders annual Press Freedom Index (Mail & Guardian: 22-28 October 2010), largely because of the behaviour of senior members of the ANC towards the press.
Let us turn to some of the main events in 2010 which signalled that press freedom was under serious threat from the ruling party and the state.
First, in July 2010 the ANC decided to revive the resolution from its 52nd National Policy Conference in Polokwane in December 2007 to investigate the establishment of a statutory media appeals tribunal to curb the excesses of a media that was, in the words of Julius Malema, leader of the ANC Youth League (ANCYL), ‘a law unto itself ’. In a discussion document, Media Transformation, Ownership and Diversity, produced in preparation for its National General Council in September 2010, the ANC argued that the self-regulatory system of the media (the Press Council, the ombudsman and the Press Appeals Panel, with the press code governing the system) had become self-serving. The media appeals tribunal could be constituted by members of parliament, nearly two-thirds of whom are ANC members, or could be chosen by MPs, and could be an appeals structure, probably with strong punitive powers. In support of the media appeals tribunal, Jacob Zuma said that human rights were trampled on by the media, that the media invaded people’s privacy, and that the media ‘must behave like everybody else’. He declared that ‘ … this media that says it is the watchdog for democracy was not democratically elected’ (The Times: 12 August 2010).
The aim of the media appeals tribunal, according to ANC spokesperson Jackson Mthembu, was to halt journalists’ ‘excesses and waywardness’. ‘If you have to go to prison, let it be. If you pay millions for defamation, let it be. If journalists have to be fired because they don’t contribute to the South Africa we want, let it be’ (Mail & Guardian: 23-29 July 2010). Blade Nzimande, the general secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP) who became the minister of higher education in 2009, supported the media appeals tribunal because ‘if there is one serious threat to our democracy, it is a media that is accountable to itself … we have no opposition other than the bourgeois media’ (The Times: 2 August 2010). Siphiwe Nyanda, a former general in the South African National Defence Force who was to become minister of communications (although he was fired in 2010), also supported the media appeals tribunal after he had endured criticism in the press for ‘high living’: ‘I do not understand how the purchase of cars and hotel stays amount to corruption. The media trivialises the matter by tagging as ‘corruption’ things done by politicians that they do not like’ (Sunday Times: 1 August 2010). Julius Malema said: ‘It is important that we need to fight this media which is ruling itself, the media which is now a law unto itself. These people, they can destroy the revolution. They think
