to investigate the expectations of the ANC regarding the media and how the ANC imagines the media, as well as how the media itself defines its role. I then proceed to explore how the independence of the media is under threat.
It must also be said at the outset that I use the terms ‘the ANC’ and ‘the media’ in an affirmative deconstructive way – that is, I use the terms and interrogate them at the same time. When I write ‘the ANC’ I do not mean that the ANC is one ideological entity. I constantly attempt to show various strands of the ANC through its various discourses, and to capture the ambiguities, nuances and ambivalences within the organisation. In the same way, ‘the media’ is not a monolithic bloc, and this too is shown in the different issues analysed in the different chapters. The theoretical concepts used will be discussed in the forthcoming sections of this chapter, and will be further elucidated in the rest of the book.
The fundamental reason for writing this book is to preserve the free press from political interference as there have been several interjections in discourse since the advent of democracy which show that there are threats. In South Africa’s less than 20-year-old democracy, the ANC’s perspective is that the media’s role needs to be clarified, contained, and directed toward the project of nation-building and transformation as it has defined these processes. Thus the ANC sees itself as engineering democracy, a democracy that is transitional, in a society which remains unequal along racial and class lines.6 Should the media in fact be free and independent from political interference? Or should its primary function be to enhance ‘nation-building’, development, and democracy in the manner defined by the former liberation movement? For many journalists, the latter would be a conflation with party political interests, and the national interest should be de-linked from party politics. Should the media take on the role of civic watchdog, forming part of the system of checks and balances on the misuse of political power and ensuring accountability for the actions of those in power, as is its role in conventional democratic states of the West? Should it simply be a mirror of the society in which it operates, reflecting the opinions of the ruling elite in a particular society? Or should journalists embrace the role of organic intellectuals, as did Gramsci?
The growing mistrust and miscommunication between the government on the one hand, and editors and journalists, on the other, since 1994 in South Africa led to a major indaba in June 2001 between the Cabinet and Sanef. The president at the time, Thabo Mbeki, remarked then that there was a need for interaction, dialogue and a process of engagement ‘so that we understand each other better’. ‘What is this national interest?’ Mbeki asked. It was interesting that Mbeki acknowledged that the term ‘national interest’ was a ‘troublesome one’, as we all come from ‘different angles, different histories and therefore respond in different ways’ (Mbeki 2001). What he did not add was that we all seem to have different understandings, not merely of what the ‘national interest’ is, but also of what ‘democracy’ is and of what a ‘free media’ means. This is the crux of the matter in this book, hence one of the key conceptualisations: democracy is a ‘floating signifier’ (open-ended in respect of its meaning).
One of the significant reasons for this book was to make a contribution such that journalists and the ANC, with their plurality of views, begin to understand one another better. Thus I offer a two-way gaze: the media on the ANC’s interventions and the ANC on the media’s interventions. Both appear to talk past each other in the way they understand press freedom, the role of the press and what the national interest is. In my understanding, it is in the national interest to expose abuse of power and corruption. This book shows how democracy is a free floating signifier in the eyes of journalists, but how the ruling tripartite alliance, primarily the ANC and the SACP, attempt to make its meaning rigid.
A postmodern, psychoanalytic approach to South African politics is apposite, for its usage shows how impossible it is to predict the twists and turns that democracy is taking and may continue to take, with the only a priori understanding being that the future path is undecided and unpredictable. As Anthony Giddens theorised, ‘Postmodernity is characterised by the fact that nothing can be known with any certainty’ (1990: 46). This lack of certainty describes the position in South Africa, post apartheid.
The idea of the politics of renewal, resignifications, critical intervention and the slipping and sliding nature of this kind of democracy provides a series of concepts that assist in analysing the reality of what is happening in the South African case. For example, the concept of resignifications is elucidated in how a populist left-wing coalition, which defeated Mbeki and brought Zuma to power, then itself began unravelling as alliances changed. Using the theories of Laclau from On Populist Reason, I have highlighted how democracy in South Africa is characterised by contingency. Through the examples of ‘Babygate’ and the Budget speech by Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, I show how easily alliances can become unsettled, especially if heterogeneous demands are crystallised in one popular figure. In this case, demands were crystallised in the figure and the name ‘Zuma’ – a name which was beginning to prove an ‘empty signifier’ for the left.
Some useful concepts
Radical pluralism, agonism
This work is set within a radical democratic political framework through which I deploy and adapt Mouffe’s works, particularly The Democratic Paradox (2000) and On the Political: Thinking in Action (2006), which grew from her earlier groundbreaking and seminal work with Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985). Mouffe (1999) argued that within the rational consensualist model of democracy you become an enemy if you do not follow the rules of the game. In a radical democracy you can be conceptualised as a legitimate adversary. This research shows that in South Africa many journalists’ voices do not follow the rules of the game, that is to say the ANC’s game, or the voice of authority that attempts to interpellate.
In this argument for the importance of the plurality of political spaces, there is a distinction between legitimate adversaries. I show that the ANC sees voices in South Africa that are critical as ‘enemy’ rather than ‘adversary’. It would prefer unity with the press, which, in its view, would create social harmony and cover up the flaws of the unfolding democracy. It would prefer to fix the meaning, or tie it in a knot via the terms ‘developmental journalism’ and ‘transformation’, to the past liberation role of the ANC. In the book, The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (1999), Mouffe dissected Schmitt’s argument for political unity, arguing instead that antagonisms do not disappear even with consensus. Schmitt feared the loss of common premises and consequent destruction of political unity and his thesis on consensus politics appears to have resonance with the views of the ANC on the media, as given voice by all three democratic presidents of the country, Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. I argue, and show, that there is no unity in the media itself: it is not a fixed, definable, single ideological entity with a totalised identity, in the same way that Mouffe argued that society does not exist as a clearly defined single entity.
Enemies of the people, the gaze and social fantasy
Žižek’s works The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), The Ticklish Subject (2000a), Interrogating the Real (2006a), How to Read Lacan (2006b) and The Indivisible Remainder (2007), contain important theoretical foundations for this book’s conceptual, analytical approach. These texts are used to explain the analytical concepts constitutive of the theoretical framework and have been applied to this analysis. Particularly pertinent is The Sublime Object of Ideology because Žižek’s concepts of social fantasy, loyalty and the symbolic ‘big other’ seem to speak directly to the current tension between the South African press and the ruling party. Equally, his concepts of ‘enemies of the nation’, ‘the gaze’, ‘point de capiton’ the ‘rigid designator’ and ‘Che Vuoi’, are all apt in my examination of how the ANC, through its desire for a ‘development journalism’, actually aims at unifying society through an unprogressive hegemony around its own ideological structuring principles.
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