.Media Freedom is Real Freedom
The release of Anton Harber’s new book, So, for the Record, about state capture, immediately released a hornet’s nest, so to speak. The trigger was his description of well-known self-styled hack, David Bullard, as “right wing”, picked up from the book by Jeremy Gordin in his review published in Politicsweb. The alleged hack responded, also in Politicsweb, with a satirical unpicking of Harber’s alleged category error. He mischievously titled his riposte “Harbering a grudge”.
The common understanding by lay folk of media freedom is that it confers a license to say anything. Not so. Media freedom confers upon journalists the right to report facts, events and stories supported with evidence, and for columnists to draw inferences from these in terms of prevailing - even competing - frames of reference. Much of the rest is “fake news”, peddled by fake presidents and the purveyors of disinformation. But readers cannot always tell the difference. For example, there are those in the US who, despite media freedom, refuse to believe that COVID-19 is not a Democratic Party conspiracy, sourced from the Chinese, and designed to promote mask wearing as an anti-Trump fashion item. As a result, the whole society is now paying the price in infections and deaths.
In fact, there is no real difference between fake news, Fox News and Russia Today. They are all geared to promote vested interests whether or not they are true. The real media try to debate different perspectives, which is why DSTV is such a wonderful facility. Surfing the same breaking stories between CNN, BBC, Sky, Euronews, CGTN, NDTV, Russia Today, CNBC, Al Jazeera, and locally between eNCA, SABC, Newzroom Africa, Business Day, Africanews, etc, exposes different ways of making sense. Try it sometime; as a viewer you can compare notes on the same stories and build your own composite picture of the mad, mad world.
In recent years, journalists in both South Africa and the US have been at the forefront of authoring many books exposing state capture, corruption, and skullduggery. Bernstein and Woodward, who broke the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s, are now amongst many breaking the Trump scandal as he and his cronies try to break America. This is the gig moment of exposé reporting and the return of investigative journalism. Previously, bottom lines and social media disrupted this crucial beat, expensive, time consuming and exhausting as it is. It took The New York Times 10 years to research and write the story that revealed that billionaire Trump proudly pays hardly any income tax. The rest of us do, so why not him?
Journalists and the media have led the way in such exposés. In the background is the academic sector that offers the usual birds-eye theoretically-led studies of media as institutions and their associated professional practices. Theory - as explanation - tends to mute the personalities and textured examples on which the much more grounded and embattled journalists cut their teeth. The former are explanatory and evidentiary based, while the journalist’s work is of-the-moment, descriptive and fact-based. The one kind of reporting (explanation) interacts with the other (the breaking story). They are both needed.
Journalists can change the world. Newspapers can suggest alternatives, with editorials and commentators debating the possibilities. Democracies cannot exist, let alone survive, without a free media. When the media are under threat, so is society, and that affects every one of us. We could lose our freedom without even knowing it. Black Wednesday, when the apartheid government banned Black edited newspapers on 19 October 1979, outraged the world.
We came pretty close to this condition again when rogue elements seized control of the public broadcaster, set up new media outlets, and closed down public debate. The seeing off of the Protection of State Information Bill and the Media Tribunal by both the media and civil society organisations saved the day - for the moment at least. Journalists themselves exposed these attempts, and many of them published books based on their reporting. In 2007, newspaper cartoonists banded together on 19 October with their own Black Wednesday protest cartoons against threatened censorship.
Journalists have written the detailed, traumatic and traumatising histories that will be studied as history by future students. They put themselves at physical risk in doing so, and some international correspondents died, were incarcerated, and were assassinated as they tried to do their jobs and bring us readers the news.
Make no mistake, journalists are on the frontline. They are our defensive ramparts against tyranny, the last bastion against corruption. When senior detectives are brazenly assassinated in full public view, those who report on such events are often next in the firing line. And, once the assassins have eliminated the decent cops, the investigative journalists and the honest lawyers and incorruptible judges, they are going to come for me, you, our families and anyone who gets in their way.
Achieving democracy is one thing. Sustaining it requires a free press and accountable institutions. Allies of the media include the Zondo and similar commissions, the whistle blowers, and the media’s informants. All commentators, including the hacks, should operate like hornets, exposing defects, and proposing solutions, and watching those who watch us, the ordinary citizens.
The media range from community freesheets, to subscription newspapers, the digital media and TV and radio outlets. It also includes community newpapers and the student press (if it still exists). Any venue that operates in terms of journalistic ethics, and evidentiary, and verifiable reporting procedures, is at the heart of a healthy democracy.
The next Black Wednesday may well be just around the corner. As citizens, we should never let journalists and the media down. That is our collective responsibility.
Keyan G Tomaselli is Professor Emeritus and Fellow, UKZN, and Distinguished Professor, University of Johannesburg. He is a previous director of the Centre for Communication, Media and Society at UKZN.
*This opinion-editorial was originally published in the Daily News and Cape Argus on 21 October 2020.