A year of healthy and noisy contestation

January 7th, 2012

It has been a year of vigorous and healthy contestation.

We have fought over the independence of the judiciary, the freedom of the media and the appropriateness of presidential appointments. We have seen combat in parliament, the courts, the streets, the ruling party, the biggest opposition party, the provinces, the cities, and even the cabinet. We have arm-wrestled over political power, policy, ideology, history, language and song lyrics.

The arguments over media freedom are central to this - and have produced some of the most heated, and overwrought, exchanges.

*This end-of-year wrap appeared in Business Day in December 2011

All over the world, there is renewed debate over the nature and extent of media freedom, fueled by two events: the release of the biggest ever quantity of government secrets via Wikileaks, and the sordid behaviour of British tabloid journalists using illegal methods to gather information and harass citizens and celebrities. The Wikileaks furore died down quickly, as it became clear that the US government would not be able to act against the organisation and could leave its founder, Julian Assange, to self-destruct. Warnings that diplomacy would become impossible if diplomats could not keep their views to themselves fell away, and everyone adjusted to the realisation that the internet had irrevocably changed the nature of secrecy, access to information and the power of governments to control these things.

The furore over British tabloidism is still the subject of formal inquiry, and is likely to lead to changes in Britain’s system of press self-regulation - significant for countries like ours which employ versions of this model. More significantly, though, the outrcy weakened the hold that Rupert Murdoch has had over the UK and US media industries and governments and showed the foolishness of allowing such unrestrained power in the hands of a one mogul. The fall of Prime Minister Sylvia Berlusconi in Italy has hopefully added to this, in the knowledge that it was the extraordinary media power that he had been allowed to accumulate that had protected him and contributed to that country’s humiliation in Europe.

In South Africa, these issues played themselves out in fights over a “Secrecy Bill”, which was an attempt to define the nature, extent and management of state secrets, and debates over the adequacy of our own system of press self-regulation.

Those who make simple and direct comparisons between the current government’s attempts to restrain the media and apartheid censorship do so without paying much attention to historical detail. This time around, we have a constitution and constitutional court as the most powerful weapons, cocked and ready to defend media freedom. We fight the battle with a media that is unrestrained, outspoken and united. In the past, much of the media and many journalists either sided with the authorities who wanted to silence pesky voices, or remained on the sidelines. This year, the media and journalists were united against attempts to limit freedom of speech like never before.

Although intense opposition has forced the government to improve the Protection of State Information Bill significantly, it remains a deeply flawed and dangerous attempt to stem the flow of information through the media to citizens and voters. The Bill, now before the upper house of parliament, is as foolish as it is sinister, given how Wikileaks has demonstrated that governments can no longer control information they way they once did, and the fact that we have many investigative journalists who have shown they are determined and brave enough to break through such barriers.

Brewing in the background is a storm over press self-regulation, with the ANC wanting to discuss the creation of a statutory appeals tribunal to watch over the printed media. The self-regulatory Press Council and Ombudsman have been beefed up in recent years, and editors have become more conscientious in their treatment of corrections and apologies, but there remains elements of government which want to constrain the power of a press which they feel to be a hostile impediment to their rule. The media is the government’s chief opposition, say the likes of cabinet minister and Communist Party chief Blade Nzimande, showing a neo-Stalinist inability to accept that our constitution protects this.

Now the industry has formed a Press Commission of respected grandees to consider further changes and improvements.

At the root of this is a crucial debate about the nature, scope and future of our democracy. The clearest statement of the one side of this debate came in a little-noticed article by ANC NEC member Ngoako Ramatlhodi in the Times newspaper a few months ago. During the negotiations period, he said, the ANC was forced to concede too much power to the media, judiciary and civil society, while the authority of the legislature was “emptied out” in an attempt to maintain “white domination under a black government”. This was now an impediment to the government’s transformation agenda, he suggested.

This push for unrestrained government power is a fundamental challenge to the principles of the constitution, which aims - like all democratic constitutions - to balance and limit state authority with an independent judiciary, a free media and an active civil society.

And that is why we can celebrate the fact that there was so much democratic contestation of public spaces this year. The government was forced to rethink the Secrecy Bill, find a new head of the Special Investigations Unit and fight its corner over the appointment of a new Chief Justice and chief prosecutor. Battles were won and lost, but they were all hard-fought.

Largely because of the rigour and vigour of investigative journalism, there is a former chief of police in prison, another suspended, a head of the SIU forced to resign, a presidential spokesman fighting for his reputation and political life and a revived arms deal inquiry. There is no clearer indication of the value of a free and outspoken media, as irksome as it is to those who want to wield power with less scrutiny and restraint.

But the media’s problems are also structural and financial. Traditional media is having to go through revolutionary change to cope with new media technologies. This was the year that the global newspaper decline hit South Africa, with sales and advertising in serious decline. Our three isiZulu newspapers and some weeklies grew, but all the others shrunk considerably.

Shriveling budgets, smaller and consolidated newsrooms, and fewer senior and specialist journalists brought real challenges to the quality and standards of journalism, here and around the world. Increasingly, any journalism that serves the public interest finds itself under commercial pressure. The internet provides many valuable tools for journalists, enhancing our work considerably, but cannot yet pay for journalists to do their work.

So the coming year presents formidable challenges for journalists, globally and locally. Every individual journalist struggles to find the space to do their work, in the face of relentless commercial pressure. Every media institution has to adapt to meet the challenges of new technology. Every body of journalists has to organise to counter attempts to restrain and restrict their work.

All of this makes for a highly contested and rowdy democracy. There are some who fear that noisiness, and would prefer calm agreement and silent consent. But the lesson of post-colonial Africa has been that it is not argument and contestation we should fear, but its absence. That raucous and sometimes jarring noise is the sound of a healthy young democracy at work.

*Harber is Caxton Professor of Journalism, Wits University

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Journalism, Online, Print