» On Garda!

On Garda!

March 19th, 2011

An SAfm producer called me yesterday to ask if I would join them on their Sunday media programme - on Human Rights Day - to talk with Ashraf Garda about media infringements of peoples’ rights. Isn’t that interesting? The problem is framed purely as media infringing rights, and there is no desire to talk about the overwhelming majority of times when the media protected, promoted and encouraged peoples’ rights.

There is no doubt in my mind that the media does a lot more to give voice to peoples’ rights than the occasional time when it tramples on them. This is not to say the latter is not a problem, but it does go to show how distorted our debate has become, how slack our language, how narrow our discourse.

Two things strike me. Those who dislike and fear the media in the ruling party have made it seem as if it is is overwhelmingly and universally guilty of relentlessly tramping on individual rights. This is patently a severe distortion of reality, a paranoid view which fails to see the other side of the coin.

Secondly, it is notable how easily SAfm have bought into this attitude. Even a media house is thinking this way, even journalists and producers are accepting this top-down definition of the problem.

To be fair, when I pointed this out, the producer apologised and backed off fast, saying they would balance it out to talk to both the media’s contribution to and intrusions into peoples’ rights.

But then this morning I see a media release on the SAfm site that says I am going to “look at the best and worst of media wrongs”. It might be that the gravest crime here is not distortion but just bad grammar.

I await the interview with trepidation and fear! I will be on my garda.

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Journalism, Media regulation, Radio

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Anton Harber: Media

Professor Anton Harber directs the Journalism and Media Studies Programme at Wits University. He is former editor of the Mail & Guardian.
Full bio

Daily newspaper sales, South Africa
(Ave sales Jul-Dec)
1960 - 681 053 (Population 17,3m)
1970 - 723 566 (22m)
1980 - 803 229 (27,5m)
1990 - 1 214 396 (35,2m)
2000 - 1 117 886 (44m)
2006 - 1 600 000 (47,3m)
2011 - 1 310 000 (49m)

(Sources: ABC and nationmaster.com)

“It was pure political theatre. The excited room was filled with government officials, government consultants, quasi-government agencies, politicians and pupils from government schools. As if on cue, the room rang with applause as one education victory after another was claimed. This was, after all, the annual drama in which the minister of basic education appears on stage to announce the Grade 12 National Senior Certificate (NSC) results …” - Educationist Jonathan Jansen, one of the few with the credibility to look critically at this “celebratory orgy of mediocrity”.

“The (Incwala) ceremony is cloaked in secrecy and marks the (Swaziland) king’s return to public life after a period of withdrawal and spiritual contemplation. Among its highlights is a symbolic demonstration by the king of his power and dominance in a process involving his penetration of a black bull … But last year’s selected bull, according to a recent account from a whistle-blowing Incwala initiate, objected strongly, and threw off Africa’s last absolute monarch.” - Some surprises in this (un-bylined) account of Swaziland politics in Southern African Report

“When the Great Zucchini arrived that Saturday morning, Don had no idea who he was. Frankly, he didn’t look like a great anything. He looked like a house painter, Don thought, with some justification. He wears no costume. He was in painter’s pants, a coffee-stained shirt and a two-day growth of beard. He toted his beat-up props in beat-up steamer trunks, with ripped faux leather and broken hinges hanging askew.” - A classic of magazine profiling, by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post.

Diepsloot (Jonathan Ball, 2011)

Diesploot: Of Frogs and Fractals, a public lecture at the University of Johannesburg, 4 August 2011

Troublemakers - The Best of South Africa’s Investigative Journalism (Jacana, 2101), edited by Anton Harber and Margaret Renn

Introduction - The Troublemakers: An account of the rise of a new wave of investigative journalism in South Africa.

What is Left Unsaid: Reporting the South African HIV Epidemic, edited by Kristin Palitza, Natalie Ridgard, Helen Struthers and Anton Harber (Fanele, 2010)