The media's response to racism

This week there has been international media outrage against a racist incident in South Africa, where four students at the University of the Free State recorded an initiation ritual where they humiliated black workers by, amongst other things, forcing them to eat a concoction into which they had urinated.
In an insightful response, Sean Jacobs hopes (but doubts) that we will see a serious discussion of the events in the media. It seems like the dominant responses emerging in the days after the incident still fail to connect this incident with larger, structural problems which continue to create the climate for racism in the country to persist. While the Mail and Guardian has done a good job of explaining the official attempts at transformation and student attitudes at the university, one hopes that they will continue to follow up with investigations into larger issues like the prevailing student culture that allowed a space for these type of initiations to take place. The M&G is also hosting a discussion event where the media's coverage of race will be discussed, which is a laudable step in self-reflection and civic engagement. But 'race' is not something that can be covered as a topic in isolation. It should be analysed in its relation to broader societal issues, relations and conditions. The M&G's report cites a posters at a protest march on campus: "Don’t blame the students, blame their parents". The fact that children can grow up in a democracy with such a sense of historical amnesia or oblivion to the structural privilege they still enjoy to think that serving urine-infested dog food to people is somehow a justified response to having to share their residence with black students, says something quite worrying about South African society. The media could be the place where the conditions that cultivate racist attitudes and create the opportunity for them to be manifested in the first place could be interrogated. The media should continue to remind the public of the vast power imbalances in the country that put idiotic white kids in a position to tell black workers to obey their commands, for the privilege of being able to clean up after them. It should continue to 'make strange' the social hierarchies, held in place by economic disparities, that South Africans often take as given. We need reports that relate these individual experiences and incidents with larger structural questions about the transformation of education in the country, access to secondary and tertiary institutions. The media should continue to provide hard figures about just how (un-)integrated campuses like Free State are. (A little symbolic touch is that the students could quite literally not even spell the Afrikaans word for 'integration' correctly in the video. Praat Afrikaans of hou jou bek, indeed). We need reporters to spend time with students (not only on the historically Afrikaans campuses, but the historically 'liberal' English ones as well) to conduct ethnographies of student attitudes and interaction. We need to know what are the social processes and institutions that have been shaping young people growing up in a democratic country to engage in the violation of human rights. In short: the media should report the Free State incident not in typical event-based style ('he-said/she-said/this happened/then that happened'), but use it as a springboard to do the long, hard and difficult work of understanding the complexities and contradictions of a society that was supposed to have been democratised almost 15 years ago. The other response we are seeing in the media is that the event is constructed as (yet another) 'isolated incident' for which a couple of individuals were responsible. Sometimes it even seems that judgement is reserved as to whether this is really 'racist' or just misguided fun. The Afrikaans media has given space to the students' parents to accuse the media of 'blowing things out of proportion', and Die Burger even dared to ask the question in a poll whether the incident should be seen as 'racism or innocent student fun' (with the results overwhelmingly in favour of 'fun').
This is not an isolated incident and the media should take care not to report it as such. By framing the incident as an shocking, outrageous event rather than as a symptom of more widespread, persisting racist attitudes in the country, the media reinforces the notion of racism as something individual rather than systemic. It then gives us the opportunity to voice our moral outrage (vicariously by framing the events as deplorable or directly by devoting web page or letter page space to responses). In rejecting the racist behaviour we obtain catharsis - of course we all deplore racism, of course we all find it disgusting and we all hate individuals like these who shatter our dreams of a new South Africa. Of course. So let's continue as before in the rainbow nation.
The point is that incidents like these show that the myth of the 'rainbow nation' continues to be exploded. Rigthwing extremism does not only take the form of a white schoolkid going on a shooting rampage in a township. It feeds off discourses, however subtle or disguised - on the web (racist rants from YouTube and Facebook to the blogosphere, where the Digital Divide ensures white voices are dominant), in popular culture (e.g. the De la Rey saga last year where young Afrikaners celebrated a Boer general who would symbolically deliver them from their perceived oppression), in sport (look at the response to the 'political appointment' of the new black Springbok coach as if redress automatically excludes merit). Instead of reporting events such as the Free State racist video only as scandals to be managed, punished or met with a political response, the media should start connecting the dots. Viewing these events as isolated incidents means that we can continue to cling to the dream that the South African transition to democracy is something that happened in 1994, rather than as something that is far from complete. Why are we surprised if we are confronted by the messy, bloody, ugly face of history that still stalks our social lives and our public discourse like a zombie that refuses to die? Because we treat incidents like the Free State race video as shocking but isolated incidents that run counter to our treasured belief that South Africans live in a new country, rather than interrogating the evidence that suggests that, in many ways, they are not. The Free State incident should create the opportunity for the media to take a long, hard look at the state of the nation. Let's see daily, weekly and monthly investigative work uncovering the attitudes, the economic structures, the social conditions and the institutional practices that continue to create a space for people like the Free State Four to somehow think that what they were doing was fun, or worse, a legitimate response to 'integration' that was forced upon them. The very fact that integration has to take place through quotas and and places in a university residence should already be an indication of how far South African society is from the widely celebrated rainbow ideal of integration. No wonder the students didn't even know how to spell the word.

The challenges of crime reporting

The South African Institute for Security Studies has highlighted the challenge of crime reporting in the country, highlighting distortions and omissions in the media's approach to dealing with this crucial issue. Much of their criticism pertains to things media can also be criticised for more generally, partly because journalism operates according to certain key 'news values' (probably the simplest way of defining a news is the old adage that when a dog bites a man its not news, but when a man bites a dog, well you've at least got a funny feature for the bottom of your front page). Some of the symptoms mentioned are: an event-driven journalism that neglects context or covers dramatic incidents but does not follow through with a long-term view; reporting focuses on crimes involving prominent or famous people; reporting is based on hearsay; statistics are misinterpreted. Read the ISS report here. pic: bbc.co.uk

Globalization, European media and African football

Globalization has contributed to a wider appreciation of African football, Charles Onyango Obbo argues in the Ugandan newspaper The Monitor. His example of the African Cup of Nations now being viewed more widely on European television screens suggests that global flows of people (what Appadurai referred to as 'ethnoscapes') and media content (Appadurai's 'mediascapes') are closely linked. Although his take on free trade and the influence of globalization on African politics is somewhat too celebratory and uncritical, Obbo importantly points out that globalization has not meant that, - excuse the pun - the global playing field has become level, since it benefits individuals more than communities or nations.

Kenya, cliches and contraflow

As the post-election crisis in Kenya continues, attention has also been directed at the way international media have been covering the events. A number of commentators have criticized the 'tribalism' cliches that have been bandied about (a summary of some of the viewpoints can be found here). On the listserv H-Net Africa there has been an ongoing debate about the coverage of the conflict by the New York Times and other international journalism outlets, while the BBC has done some good introspection. While these debates rightly criticize the international media for often lazy or sloppy journalism, new media technologies like cellphones and the internet have facilitated a contraflow from Kenyan observers themselves. With a ban on live news reports in place, new media technologies seemed to have helped Kenyans circumvent official (silenced) channels. Cell phones were used to keep Kenyans in the diaspora in touch with stranded relatives, news updates were sent via SMS, while on the Internet several excellent blogs on sites like Global Voices and Pambazuka News (now also on Facebook ) have been tracking developments. Of course newspapers like the Daily Nation are also available online.

So there are alternatives to the 'tribalism' cliches available, and they are not that hard to find.

Is a circulation figure just a number?

I am no religious adherent to political economy approaches of media, contrary to what my previous post about Johncom's bid to buy the Sunday Times might have suggested. I do think political economy approaches in their crude incarnations are often rigid and unhelpful if account is not taken of journalistic agency. Yet economic considerations, especially in highly unequal societies like South Africa, have to enter the equation constantly if one is to arrive at a contextually informed analysis. But these economic conditions also have to be viewed in terms of the social and cultural context. When commercial interests combine with religious fundamentalism, it can become really ugly: two weeks ago, the South African Afrikaans Sunday paper Rapport appointed the controversial columnist Deon Maas (pictured) in the hope that he would stir up things a little (as he has already done at Rapport’s sister newspaper in the Media 24 group, Die Burger). But Rapport didn’t expect Maas to stir up things quite as much as he did when he wrote a column with the title ‘666 is just a number’ and arguing that in a free and democratic society, well, logically, Satanism also should be able to enjoy religious freedom and tolerance. The paper's readers - the majority of whom will never stand accused of being free-thinking liberals - did not feel the love. They embarked on an SMS campaign threatening a consumer boycott (but reportedly also threatening to resort to more, uhm, old-fashioned methods like burning delivery trucks) if Maas was not fired. Which, merely two weeks after he appointed him, the editor Tim du Plessis promptly did. Said Du Plessis of his reason to close down debate (rather than, for instance, using the pages of his paper as a space for what Henry Miller called a ‘nation in conversation with itself’): ‘The decision changed from one about freedom of speech to one of commercial interests’. Did anyone say ‘economic determinism’?
Anton Harber provided another interesting perspective on his blog - pointing out how the threats from Rapport's readers is an example of how new media technologies can also empower reactionaries. Looked at from that perspective, this was not a case of merely economic interests (although those were the bottom line by Du Plessis' own admission) but also an example of the new interactivity between journalists, editors and readers made possible by new technologies. It is a valid point that underscores the importance of not viewing new technologies like emails and SMS's only as a progressive force for journalism.
Whatever way you look at it, it was a bad turn of events.

The Political Economy of South African Media

There are some that criticize political economy approaches to understanding media as top-down, conspiracy theories. But when today it came to light that a consortium associated with the Mbeki political camp is involved with a bid to take over Johnnic Communications, owner of, amongst others, the South African Sunday Times, one cannot but observe that politics and economy are inextricably linked. The Sunday Times, under the editorship of Mondli Makhanya (pictured), has been a thorn in the side of the Mbeki government over the past few years. The latest example of the tension developing between the newspaper and the government was the controversial (and to my mind ethically rather dodgy, to say the least) publication of the medical records of the current Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. One is therefore tempted to see in this bid an attempt to co-opt what has become one of the (notoriously sensitive) Mbeki government's fiercest critics. One can expect the media to display outrage about this move to incorporate dissent (the first, predictable, comparison with apartheid has already been made). But isn't this market-led 'independence' and 'freedom' part of the deal that the South African media has been clamouring for persistently over the last number of years? In a democracy where freedom of speech is Constitutionally guaranteed, you cannot close down newspapers willy-nilly. But the market can silence and marginalise voices. If a diversity of perspectives, a broad-based public sphere and wide participation from the citizenry is so important (such as it should be), why have most of the significant attempts to broaden the mediated public sphere in the post-apartheid era come from the government itself? One thinks here of the Media Diversity and Development Agency, for instance, which, when established, was met with accusations of 'government interference' by the mainstream commercial media in the country. It will be interesting to see where the debate about the attempt to buy Johncom will be going. But a certain proverb about making beds and sleeping in them comes to mind.

Media images of Aids in South Africa

Why, when the HIV/Aids pandemic in South Africa is among the worst in the world, does the South African media pay such little attention to it? According to a study by Media Tenor from 2004-2005, the South African media devoted less than one percent of its coverage to the pandemic. In an article published in the latest African Studies Quarterly (available free online), Sean Jacobs and Krista Johnson put it down to a range of reasons relating to the way the South African media is structured political-economically as well as the journalistic conventions and routines it operates within. The result of the confluence of these structural and journalistic factors was a trivialisation of HIV/Aids and a sensational approach to the conflicts between government and social movements.
The media's poor record in this regard, the authors argue, is part of the democratic deficit in the country. For a media industry that is very vocal about its 'independence' and 'freedom', their efforts in response to the tragic proportions that HIV/Aids have taken in the country have just not been good enough.