South Africa

Boys and girls we are on a slippery slope. Last Friday night at 10:30pm The Jamiat-ul Ulama of Transvaal (JUT), was granted an interdict against Johncom Media and Independent Newspapers among others, preventing them from publishing these cartoons. In a press statement the JUT stated :

The Jamiatul Ulama is deeply offended by cartoons mocking the Holy Prophet Muhammad Sallallâhu 'alayhi wasallam and depicting him as a terrorist in certain recent European publications. It is evident that these publications were aiming to demonise the character and personality of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) who is followed by 1.5 billion Muslims globally and who is admired by millions of others all over the world. The publication of these cartoons demonstrates contempt for the religious beliefs of the Muslim Community. These publications have abused freedom of speech by taking it to a dangerous, irresponsible and unacceptable level by showing disregard for the sensitivities of Muslims around the world.

 

The cartoons in question are (in my opinion), in very poor taste. Being an adult with the right to make up my own mind I have made a choice and decided to reject the message that has been transmitted to me by these cartoons. This is my right as an individual and (some would argue) obligation as an informed citizen. What kind of country would we live in if some entity or group decided what was the “correct” message for all people to receive and follow (think back about 15 years and you’d find a good example of this type country). This cannot stand!

The last time I checked we lived in a secular constitutional democracy, not a religious theocracy dominated by the clergy and religious sensitivities. The key word since the founding of our “new” Republic has been a theme of tolerance and not acceptance. What I mean by this is best illustrated by a simple example – say you are on a bus and you hear a baby crying loudly in a seat close to you. Even though you find the sound extremely irritating, you do not order the mother to keep the child quiet or order them off the bus. Instead you tolerate the noise – you may not like or accept the ruckus, but you tolerate it because you realize this is the price of living in a society with many different types of people. In a country as diverse as ours this is tolerance in action and is the tradeoff we make on a daily basis in order to peacefully coexist. 

Let’s look to another illustration, imagine a raving capitalist-agnostic stumbled on the JUT website and finds this article entitled “YOUR GREATEST THREAT!: Secularism - The Abandonment of Shari’ah”. The capitalist-agnostic finds this article extremely offensive because it goes against everything he believes in and furthermore insults his core beliefs through statements like:

Apart from waging a brutal and unholy war on Muslims, the aggressive and godless secularists are waging a quieter but more damaging war against Islam and its true followers. Through its seemingly shiny but truly deceptive tools such as democracy, free market trade, capitalism, pluralism and human rights, secularism brainwashes the world into believing that success and happiness lies in the secular approach, as religions are outdated and old fashioned! The acceptance of legislation formulated by man means a preference of mans limited knowledge and experience above the All Knowing and All Wise guidance of the Creator and Owner of all things.

 

So what should the agnostic do in the face of these openly hostile and insensitive statements? Should he approach the High Court and demand an interdict against the JUT for publishing such material, or should he just allow the JUT to have their own opinions and tolerate their unsavory views? If you are a JUT member remember you have set the precedent so you don't have a choice in answering (just like you made the choice for the rest of us on Friday)...

Once you open the Pandora’s box of censorship, it is extremely difficult to close.

I am nearly 100% sure this indictment will be overturned, if not it does not bode well at all for the future.

(For a more legalistic look at this debate checkout Politics.za. Thanks to Darren at Commentary for the links to the cartoons. The Times has a great collection of opinions from various personalities) 

An Oscar nominee that has a South African connection and yet has been basically ignored locally is the short-documentary "The Death of Kevin Carter". For those who don't know, Carter was a member of the infamous "Bang-Bang Club" of photojournalists who became (in?)famous in the early nineties for their work covering violence in the townships. In 1994 Carter won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for this image of a starving child in the Sudan.   

For a more complete description of Carter's dark but fascinating life visit this link, or buy the book "Bang-Bang Club" (highly recommended).

I have watched the birth of our own citizen based internet “newspaper” (Reporter.co.za) with a lot of interest. Anything that boosts grassroots participation in the media in an age where access to information is paramount can only be a good thing. However a number of concerns come attached with this form of “journalism”. Having watched the evolution of the trendsetter in this area, (OhMyNews in Korea) I have seen how this form of news can be both help and a hindrance in effectively providing reliable and unbiased news to the public.

Probably the most positive aspect of this form of Media is that it is extremely inclusive and allows basically anyone with a good story to tell and an internet connection to become a “reporter”. This vastly increases the amount of information available on a variety of topics and lets people who are typically overlooked by the mainstream media contribute to what is the news of the day. But it is not so much the positive aspects of this reporting that concern me, it is the “Trojan” features of it that worry me.

I have seen this happen in OhMyNews and I noticed the first example of it today in our Reporter.co.za. As has been written in a lot of articles about this form of media, ultimately the quality of these “newspapers” (as in traditional media) depend on the quality of the editorial staff who have to view thousands of what are essentially “Letters to the Editor”. Now for whatever reason sometimes stories slip through that are blatantly biased or written in a manner designed to promote a certain agenda. Such a charge has been leveled against at OhMyNews for its “coverage” of the election of the most recent Korean President or the anti-American sentiments that gripped the peninsula in 2002. With “citizen reporters” the writers were not placing their credibility at stake each time they put pen to paper (admittedly this has changed with some “reporters” became regular contributors) unlike regular journalists. The contributors are not trained journalists, who are held up to a certain standard of reporting by their peers and readers.  The fact of the matter was that screening by editors was basically the only barrier between the contributor and the publishing of articles. Editors didn’t have the time to check out or verify each and every story or the background of the contributors and mistakes have crept in.

This brings me round to what I read today on Reporter.co.za. Take a look at this story. Reads like a press-release doesn’t it, saying all the right things about how great reasonable SASCO is? Well now look who wrote it. According to the SASCO website Floyd Shivambu is a “leading member” of SASCO – but reading the article you would never realize that, in fact you’d probably think it was just contributed by some member of Joe Public. It is placed in the news section of the site, giving it a sheen of real news credibility and the false impression of real independent “news”, when in fact it isn’t – it’s basically a SASCO press release. This is what I mean by “Trojan” journalism – people writing and contributing articles not with the intention of informing but rather to advance their own agenda…

We’ll have to see how Reporter.co.za develops.   

Time for a shameless plug.

Get the new "Not the M&G" written by Robert Kirby which is described as a "startling and savagely satirical parody of the Mail & Guardian newspaper. Any similarity between real people and characters portrayed here is anything but coincidental" - a brilliant read that will keep you entertained for awhile! Here are some highlights :

Mbeki in surprise SA visit 

In an unexpected move that caught political commentators on the back foot, President Thabo Mbeki made a surprise visit to South Africa last Wednesday. His unannounced arrival was leaked to Not the Mail & Guardian by a part-time hangar-sweeper at the South African Air Force base at Swartkops, outside Tshwane.

 

Incomes-based education introduced

The Department of Education has announced that the next and necessary phase of its futuristic policy will be introduced on a trial basis during the second half of this year. The new phase is called Incomes-Based Education and will be exactly what it sounds like. The more the learner pays, the more the learner gets taught.

 

New Cabinet Appointment

In a move typical of its bold and uncompromising style of African National Congress leadership, a convicted fraudster has been appointed to the Cabinet. Prisoner number 456788/98, Mbelikanqa Moujamgabale, currently serving a 33-year sentence for corruption, theft and fraudulently impersonating a tax collector, is the new deputy minister of local government.

It hurts doesn't it? After years of having the government cheerleaders SABC journalists at your beck and call, following your every moving and reporting on each and every single one of your horrendously boring speeches now to be told "sorry old boy but you are just not quite the brilliant guy we once thought you were". What's a former Deputy President to do?

What indeed, but to try get Snuki on speed-dial.....asap.

But unfortunately it would seem His Master has already spoken, and if there's one thing the boys at the SABC are good at, it is playing ball exercising sound editorial judgment.

"Just to reiterate, America is now less progressive than South Africa..."

                                                 - John Stewart The Daily Show

Love this show, checkout the clip here.

And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. - Winston Smith, 1984

 

We have :

"Racist sharks that only devour white swimmers, husband-snatching witchdoctors and a magic tree with penis-enlarging leaves. Such lurid tales ensure that South Africa's young tabloid industry is riding a wave of sales.

 

Driven by a classic red-top formula of sex and celebrity with a distinctive African bent, the introduction of tabloids has proved a hit with the country's black majority 11 years after the fall of apartheid."

Four major newspaper groups - Independent Newspapers, Johnnic Communications, Naspers and CTP/Caxton, dominate the South African print media market. I guarantee that if you pick up a magazine or newspaper it will have been printed by one of these four media giants. The amount of market share and power these groups have is truly staggering. Let's take a closer look (extract from SouthAfrica.info) :  

Independent Media, owned by Irish tycoon Tony O'Reilly, first acquired a stake in local newspapers in 1995 when it took control of Argus Newspapers in the 1990s and renamed it Independent Newspapers. Independent Newspapers is a wholly owned subsidiary of Independent News and Media (South Africa) Limited. It publishes 14 daily and weekly newspapers in the country's three major metropolitan areas.

 

The Star is the group's flagship daily newspaper. Other dailies are the Cape Argus, the premier isiZulu newspaper Isolezwe, Daily News, Cape Times, the Mercury, Pretoria News, the Diamond Fields Advertiser, Business Report and Daily Voice. Independent's Sunday newspapers are the Sunday Tribune, Independent on Sunday and Sunday Independent, with the Post published on Wednesdays and Fridays.

 

The group enjoys aggregate weekly sales of 2.8-million copies, reaches about 63% of English newspaper readers, and receives about 48% of total advertising spend in the paid newspaper market.

 

Johnnic Communications is owned by a coalition of black business groups and trade unions, the National Empowerment Consortium. The consortium bought TML from Anglo American's Omni Media Corporation in 1996. Johnnic also publishes the Sunday Times, South Africa's biggest Sunday newspaper, as well as the Sowetan, Business Day, Sunday World, Daily Dispatch, the Herald, Weekend Post, Algoa Sun, Ilizwi and Our Times.

 

The group also owns music publishing company Gallo Music, movie distributor Nu Metro, the Exclusive Books chain of bookshops, and Struik, New Holland and Map Studio publishers.

 

Nasionale Media, commonly referred to as Naspers, is a multinational media group with its principal operations in print media - newspapers, magazines, printing, book publishing and private education - and electronic media such as pay television and internet service provision. 

 

Print media comprises two segments: Media24, and book publishing and private education. Media24 is the largest publisher of magazines, one of the largest publishers of newspapers and the largest printer and distributor of magazines and related products in Africa.

 

Media24's newspaper division publishes five national dailies: Daily Sun, Die Burger, Beeld, Volksblad and the Natal Witness. Daily Sun is the largest daily newspaper in South Africa. On Sundays, the company publishes Rapport, City Press and Sunday Sun, printed in four cities and distributed nationally. It also has two weekly publications, Soccer-Laduma and Son, and English and Afrikaans community newspapers in the Western Cape, Eastern Cape, Free State, Northern Cape, Vaal Triangle and North West.

 

Media24 Magazines controls more than 60% of the country's magazine circulation, with 40 titles.

 

Caxton and CTP Publishers and Printers is 38% owned by Johnnic Communications. The group publishes the Citizen daily, which has a circulation of about 91 000. The newspaper division stables 88 free and sold Caxton owned or co-owned titles, as well as 30 regional and community newspapers. The magazine division publishes 15 titles, including Farmer's Weekly, the oldest magazine in South Africa.

 

That is a lot of power concentrated in relatively few hands. I was always under the impression that there were media laws limiting the number of newspapers and magazines a single corporation could control. Clearly this is not the case. The current system seems to rely very strongly on editorial independence as a means of preventing conflicts of interests in the news. International journalist and Stellenbosch University Professor Extraordinaire Govin Reddy made the following point in a recent conference :

“In the past, publishers had certain values--they knew that newspapers were important and that they could help determine what happens at election time,” Reddy said. “The goal today for these giant media corporations worldwide seems to be getting the highest ratings and the biggest piece of the advertising cake. Instead of serving their citizens, these organizations now spend most of their time watching their company’s bottom line.”

 

Food for thought?

Ferial Haffajee is a journalist that I have a lot of respect for. As Editor of the M&G she consistently delivers the goods with easily the best paper in SA. However, her latest Comment and Analysis piece on BEE left me a bit on disappointed. While I did agree with some of the things she wrote, on other counts I thought she was off the mark.   

BEE is spoken of in a language of limitation and of failure, instead of potential and success. The currency of this debate has quickly become that of “usual suspects”; “waBenzi” and “elite”. It is particularly galling because the commentators are usually privileged (white) people who live in leafy suburbs and who choose not to drive Mercs: in other words, elites themselves but with different motoring habits and of liberal and left politics.

Even if their modes of transport are beat up Jettas and their dress of choice scruffy Levi’s (or Fairtrade denims), they have had the benefits of inter-generational wealth transfer and the comfort of bequests and annuities that allow for good education for their children and ensure comfortable golden years. This inter-generational wealth and dignity is so taken for granted that many of these commentators are blinded to the fact that for many of the compatriots they so label, the goals are just the same; I am, for example, the first generation in my family to have a retirement annuity. For many of my cousins and I, we are the first generation (most of us beneficiaries of employment equity) who will bequeath to our children.

Now to me most of the negative characterisations of BEE have arisen recently because many have started to believe that the promised mass based program has been hijacked by the politically well connected who have changed a well meaning program into a get super-rich Casino. The words that Haffajee chooses  “usual suspects”; “waBenzi” and “elite” shows this, if people were truly against BEE they would use different, much harsher adjectives to vent their rejection of BEE. The motoring habits comment I just find bizarre and I think Haffajee misses the point. Again, the way BEE was sold to South Africa was as a means to empower and enable the majority through providing them with the tools to succeed. I do not remember reading in the BEE charter a section that recipients should be filthy rich and engage in as much conspicuos consumption as possible! The "annuity" aside is just a lowblow meant to reinforce Haffajee's perception that the White Liberal Middle class has no right to complain about any part of BEE, as if it makes any difference -- valid criticism is valid criticism no matter who makes it. Would it make any difference if it was someone in the townships making the same comments (as many do).  

Of course, like all rapid wealth creation, and especially that which is so aggressively state-assisted, BEE is swashbuckling with all the elements of frontier capitalism.

 

It is replete with quick fortunes, backbiting, shady characters and eyebrow-raising business habits, many of which we cover in the Mail & Guardian. It is a capitalist process, after all. Established business in South Africa has always had such eyebrow-raising habits: cartels are commonplace; corporate governance is new and not terribly well entrenched; there are few links between performance and pay and, until the era of unbundling, the usual suspects owned everything. Apart from a few laudable exceptions, the coverage of these practices by analysts and journalists was nowhere near as robust as that of BEE.

 

Double standards?

BEE is many things but is most definitely NOT capitalism. It is much closer to a form of hybrid socialism, which is another reason why the obscene fortunes made by so many BEE Kings is all the more depressing. Is the coverage a double standard? Of course it is! Capital in SA has got away with too much for too long, but if we work from this precept then why shouldn't BEE deals be held up to higher scrutiny? Aren't you Ferial, falling into the same trap of "BEE [being] spoken of in a language of limitation and of failure". Instead why don't we raise the scrutiny of ALL Capital rather than reduce our focus on BEE, now we are talking in the language of "potential and success"

Yet to label and malign the whole process, does not allow for a textured and nuanced debate the era requires. Of course, the accumulation of connection as symbolised by the former director general of communications, Andile Ngcaba, whose stake in Telkom earned him more than R800-million is ripe for criticism.

He bought a stake from the Thintana consortium, a Malaysian-American joint venture, to which he had initially sold a stake in Telkom as the director general of communications. Ngcaba has gone on to erect an empire of IT interests; he is there in every big deal.

 

That is the smoking gun for BEE in its present form and I agree with Haffajee wholeheartedly on this count. The entire BEE process is not a failure and there are a number of noticeable successes, however we still have a very long way to go before we can consider the program a success that all South Africans can be proud of.

It takes a special kind of man to take a functioning newsroom and bring it to its knees. With a smoke in one hand and a Marlborough Manesque devotion to duty, this man can break an organisation so completely that senior staff desert in droves. Giving a wink to his idol Leni Riefenstahl, this man of vision changes dynamic debate and news analysis into hollow, sycophantic government spin. In SA we have such a man...

Snuki "Goebbels" Zikala!   

Yes, he's (unfortunately) back on Someamoungus! Our favourite journalist spinmerchant with his government mandated checklist of "3 Ministers and a Thabo soundbite" per news broadcast is again making his presence felt at the SABC for all the wrong reasons. Witness the latest :

Several top journalists have quit the SABC, reportedly because their working conditions under Snuki Zikalala, the managing director of news, have become intolerable. Several SABC staffers told The Sunday Independent on condition of anonymity they too would leave if given the opportunity because as journalists they were expected to present exclusively positive stories about government activities.

Lesego Mncwango, the SABC spokesperson, on Friday confirmed the resignations of Vuyo Mvoko, the political editor, and Kalay Maistry and Clayson Monyela, both senior political reporters. Three members of the science desk - Mahlatse Gallens, Stuart Thompson and Mandla Zembe - have also quit. Zembe was allegedly hounded by S'bu Ndebele, the KwaZulu-Natal premier, for reporting that Ndebele had been stoned at a June 16 meeting.

 

Lesego also denied that Snookums was causing members to flee :

On Friday, Mncwango, rejected "faceless critics" who claimed "things have worsened". He said there was a "new mood" at the SABC, and a definite sense of common purpose among the board and management.

"We can confirm that the individuals are leaving the SABC to pursue both career and academic development. We reject the suggestion of an 'exodus'. As is the case with all media institutions, journalists choose to further their careers by moving to other employers. This is accepted practice in newsrooms."

 

To which a "faceless critic" (hint hint nudge nudge) replied :

"There is no spirit at the SABC, she's talking crap, she's paid to spin."

 

So who are you gonna believe?