than any other profession (Weale 2016; Jones 2016). According to Viner (2017), ‘This matters because people from exclusive, homogenous backgrounds are unlikely to know anyone adversely affected by the crises of our era, or to spend time in the places where they are happening. Media organisations staffed largely by people from narrow backgrounds are less likely to recognise the issues that people notice in their communities every day as “news”; the discussions inside such organisations will inevitably be shaped by the shared privilege of the participants.’ Similar to the UK, South Africa’s public sphere is still very much an elite sphere, and mediated national conversations on matters of public interest are predominantly determined by the interests of this elite (Duncan 2013b; Friedman 2011).
There is a societal danger in the routine exclusion of some voices while over-amplifying others. A society risks only becoming aware of a mounting crisis at the grassroots level when it is too late and when there is a social explosion, such as the critical events and subsequent massacre at Marikana (Duncan 2013b). But even when not taking such extreme dangers into account, the problem of the inequitable representation of voice still matters. The most basic and fundamental societal mandate of the news media is to inform: to provide audiences with accurate, trustworthy and relevant information about the world around them.
Regarding the South African news media, this means representing a realistic picture of the country. But this is a country that includes, and is predominantly populated by, the economically marginalised and poor. Yet, voice(s) from this societal sector are habitually excluded. The segment of society that enjoys the largest representation of mediated voice is but a small portion of the citizenry. How then, are we to know what is going on in our world when we are presented with such a limited picture? Additionally, when so under-informed about a broader spectrum of realities, how can we realistically initiate national discourses aimed at societal coherence, economic development or the meaningful promotion of social justice? In simple terms, how can we solve our own problems when we have very little idea of what is really going on?
PUTTING VOICE(S) FIRST
The various research studies mentioned in chapter 1 examined the (mis)representation of voice(s) particular to a specific marginalised profile or demographic, that is, the youth, women or protestors. In this book we chose to follow a slightly different approach, and, instead of examining a broad category of marginalised persons, honed in instead on three very particular communities and sites where stories of high news value have played out. The demographic of the people we spoke to was then of secondary importance to us.
Of primary importance were the stories that each individual had to tell – their personal iteration of voice, which, of course, was nonetheless imbued with their particular demographic identity. By collecting the stories and first-hand accounts of persons who had actually lived through a particular set of events, we were able to then compare the contents of these first-hand accounts to the way in which these same events had been retold by the dominant news media. It is only a small adjustment of methodological focus, but it makes all the difference. A detailed comparison to news media content is not possible when examining the perspectives of a particular demographic of participant regardless of their individual position: here, even though each participant may belong to a similar demographic, each will have experienced a different set of events. Instead, we opted to talk to people who had lived through a particular set of events by focusing on the geographic communities where those events had taken place, meaning that we could thereafter compare the collected first-hand accounts to the manner in which these events had been retold by the dominant media.
Another important shift in methodological focus was that when we interviewed our participants, we did not approach the interview with a stringent, predetermined set of must-ask questions. Given the centrality of voice(s) to this project, we knew that we had to interrogate our own strategies of listening. On a purely practical level, this meant we needed to rethink how we were going to approach the interviews with the different participants from the three communities that we were working with in order to best allow them adequate space to narrate their own stories.
We did not ask the people we talked with to focus on any particular aspect, event or key category as identified by us. We only asked them to do one thing: we asked them to tell their story. We found that in allowing them to claim as much lateral narrative space as they liked, they related to us in far more depth, detail and richness of content than if we had interjected and tried to force their responses to focus on any set of stringent predetermined categories or questions.
Of course, this is not always a comfortable thing for a researcher or a journalist to do. We are trained to get straight to the core of a story in the least time possible, to focus only on the ‘facts’ and ignore unnecessary waffle. The arrogance of this approach, however, is that it too often denies the respectful iteration of voice(s). Firstly, it assumes a position of power on the part of the researcher or journalist. It is the researcher and/ or journalist who will decide what information is relevant and what is not and will guide the engagement accordingly. The arrogance of the myth of the ‘expert’ here disenables the notion of voice as a process of engagement and all of the richness that lies therein.
Social scientists and journalists, however, are problematically trained to approach interviews with a predetermined set of criteria in mind, or a set of research goals and objectives, which then determines the trajectory of the inflexibly formulated interview guideline or schedule (a preset list of questions that have to be asked of each interviewee). Researchers will tell you that this has to be done to ensure consistency, reliability and validity in the data, as if people’s personal accounts of their experiences and lives can be properly described by a term as impersonal as ‘data’. Journalists will tell you that this approach is necessary in order to collect only those ‘facts’ that are of relevance to the news story they are piecing together, as if the only parts of peoples’ stories that are relevant are the ones that we in our supposed ‘expert’ knowledge deem to be relevant. But as journalists and researchers, who are we, really, to say what is relevant and what is not with regard to an event that we have not lived, are not personally impacted by and of which we have no situational or historical experience? Who, then, is the real ‘expert’ on the story if not the people whose lives are directly determined by it?
Secondly, when we are too hasty to arrive at only the ‘facts’ of an isolated event, we too often miss, overlook and disregard important contextual and historical details that would more accurately inform understandings of current events. Again, this approach ignores voice as an embodied process, that it is socially grounded and that each narrative retelling of events is only one part of a broader interlocking set of related narratives.
Thirdly, the narrow, delimiting and sound-bite-driven approach to interviewing so often applied by researchers and journalists ignorantly and arrogantly bears little respect for difference and diversity, which is another key aspect in the value of voice. Again, where each voice is distinct, the failure to recognise the differences between voices is a failure to recognise voice at all. However, an engagement with the multiplicity of voice(s) that are able to speak to one event requires more patience than what the narrow, more traditional approach to interviewing allows.
Fourthly, a narrow and limited approach to interviewing does not do much in terms of respecting human dignity, or in terms of treating people as if they do in fact know how to tell their own stories. Further, simply claiming (or being allowed) the room to narrate one’s own story, or speaking, is not sufficient to effect the successful process of voice. To afford dignity to the speaker, then the speaker must know that their voice matters and that it is heard (Couldry 2010: 1). But do these voice(s) really matter to us if we insist that they only speak to the particular predetermined categories that we have established before the engagement even commences?
THE CURRENT CONTEXT: POST-1994 SOUTH AFRICA
Every age has its own fascism, and we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the
