in violence and corruption.
The Amadiba region encompasses several rural villages along the Wild Coast region of the Eastern Cape Province. The Amadiba community has been involved in lengthy struggles centred on the issuing of mining rights on their land as well as associated road construction. These have involved all levels of the state as well as private mining corporations. The Amadiba Crisis Committee (ACC), a community-based organisation, has for many years been at the forefront of opposing the proposed dune mining in the Xolobeni area. In March 2016, the chairperson of the ACC, Sikhosiphi ‘Bazooka’ Radebe, was assassinated.
Thembelihle is an urban, semi-informal community situated in the Johannesburg Metro, near Soweto. Thembelihle has a long history of social justice struggle centred on housing, forced relocation, urban development, political party contestation and the right to protest. Members of this community have routinely been subjected to acute police brutality, and have been arrested and wrongfully detained, while community leaders and organisers have been personally targeted by security services, having their homes raided by the police, their families and children intimidated and some have been forced into hiding.
In doing the research for this book, we engaged with relevant organisations and activists who both work with and live in each of the communities. This was followed by setting up a range of in-depth interviews in each community. We made physical visits to the communities to conduct the interviews and in order to get the real, full, detailed and bottom-up versions of the respective stories.
A full-scale media content analysis was conducted in order to determine how the stories relevant to each of these three communities were represented by the dominant media, as well as how these stories have been communicated by the relevant centres of power, including government. Through collating a range of research materials, as well as interview transcripts, and then through critical analysis, the book places these all within the macro socio-economic and political context of South Africa since 1994. This then allows a demonstration of how the accumulated evidence exposes the gap between the actual/real stories of these communities and those told by the dominant media, and, in the process, exposes the mistruths, myths and self-interested motivation behind the dominant discourse and thought frame that characterises the storytelling of the dominant news media.
We followed a similar methodology of combining a media content analysis coupled with in-depth interviews to Duncan’s 2016 study, when she investigated the news media’s reportage of protests and protestors in the regions of Rustenburg, Mbombela, Blue Crane Route (focusing specifically on Cookhouse) and the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro. ‘These were the sites where in-depth interviews were conducted … so the narratives of the protestors could be compared and contrasted with the main narratives in the news articles’ (Duncan 2016: 150). While Duncan was dealing specifically with the representation of protest and protestors, and we set out to investigate the stories not necessarily of protestors, but of particular communities involved in struggles with high news value, the methodology adopted by Duncan nonetheless proved instructive. Perhaps not surprisingly, however, the character of Duncan’s (2016) findings was similar to ours regarding the manner in which the dominant media routinely applied negative and stereotypical frames to the stories of the poor, as opposed to the markedly different stories told by the people themselves.
In short, this book aims to provide a long-overdue opportunity for these groups of marginalised and downtrodden peoples to practise voice, to tell their stories as they have lived and experienced them during the post-apartheid period, and for those stories to be inserted into the overall public sphere of national debate.
Chapter 2 describes the manner in which we approached the interview process. Knowing that we wished to surface a multiplicity of voice(s) from the three communities of Glebelands, Xolobeni and Thembelihle, we initially needed to rethink and interrogate our own strategies of listening. This chapter also contextualises the social and economic landscape of post-1994 South Africa, and presents the architecture of how we constructed the retelling of the collected narratives of the three communities.
Chapters 3, 4 and 5 form the heart of the book. Here, the stories of the three selected communities are first briefly contextualised within the larger developmental and political economy of contemporary South Africa. This allowed us to better appreciate both the political and socio-economic location and the importance of these stories. The remainder of each chapter focuses on surfacing voices from each of the three communities. Each community sub-section begins with a concise history/biography of the community, followed by excerpts taken from the interviews conducted, which are organised according to various topics that are relevant to the community context and associated stories.
In chapter 6, the focus is turned towards the dominant media, whose character and content (when it comes to covering the marginalised and the poor) is revealed as being in core service to a profit-driven model and elitist narrative. To empirically back up this argument, the chapter proceeds to provide a succinct cross-section analysis covering all three communities, including examples selected from a comprehensive post-1994 sampling of print articles and audio-visual clips from numerous media outlets that constitute the dominant media in South Africa. In doing so, the analysis serves two reinforcing purposes: to reveal key differences, contradictions, omissions and indeed completely opposite ‘tellings’ between the stories told by the residents and those contained in the dominant media; and to subject the storytelling of the dominant media to both objective and subjective critique.
Chapter 7 provides a framing of South Africa’s post-1994 macro socio-economic and political realities of unequal relations of class, racial and gender position and power, which produce societal dominance in various ways. It is within this macro framing that the presence, content and character, as well as practical role, of South Africa’s dominant media can be properly conceptualised and understood. This is done by offering a double-sided analysis-argument of the dialectic of this dominance, backed up by the use of selected parts of the stories told by community members, as well as examples taken from media articles. On the one hand, it shows the ways in which dominant narratives have rooted and shaped the developmental experiences and life possibilities of the targeted communities and their struggles. On the other hand, it reveals the ways in which the dominant media has foundationally constructed a dominant thought frame and discourse that has enabled, reflected and moulded a dominant way of seeing and thinking about poor communities and their struggles and thus also of how their related stories are told.
We then turn our attention in chapters 8, 9 and 10 to how this media behaviour can and ought to be changed, as well as the benefits of doing so. Chapter 8 addresses the double-edged predicament faced by much of the world’s dominant news media presently, that is, the crisis of credibility and a crisis of financial sustainability. The chapter investigates how these could both be alleviated through increased levels of media content diversity, with an emphasis on the inclusion of marginalised voice(s).
In chapter 9, we discuss how critical debates on news media behaviour have regularly been scuppered by illogical arguments that equate legitimate critique with intolerable ‘attacks’ on the freedom of the press. This mythologisation of the journalistic profession, which places it beyond reproach and is framed in catchphrases like ‘journalism is not a crime’, often act as a hindrance to constructive debates on how the news media could perform better. Indeed, critique is also not a crime. The chapter argues for a redefinition of the popular understanding of media freedom to one that includes a concern for audience-centred freedoms,
