Can South African democracy survive its media?

By: Steven Friedman,

DEMOCRACY, we all know, cannot survive without free media. But can it get by with a media unable and unwilling to inform citizens?

Much of this country’s democracy works much better than we are often told – at least for the one third whose voices are heard by its politics. But, while the freedom of the media has remained intact since 1994, it would be very hard to argue that citizens are well served by a media which enables people to make informed political choices.

The media’s biases are clear to anyone who cares to read or listen or watch. In a country divided between insiders and outsiders, they offer the view of the insiders, those who earn a wage or salary or profits from the mainstream economy. And so they ignore or show contempt for the majority who are not in this happy position. A single escape from prison gets saturated coverage, repeated murders of shack dweller activists exercising their democratic rights are almost entirely ignored.

Load shedding’s effect on the lives of shack dwellers or spaza shop owners may get a mention, but only because power cuts affect the insiders too. But we are told little or nothing about the struggle of many to survive in the face of rising food costs while they cope with the loss of jobs triggered by Covid-19.

This obviously makes it much harder for most South Africans to enjoy a say in the decisions which affect them. But it also means that the insiders know little more about the majority of their fellow citizens than whites knew about the black majority under apartheid. The political life of most people is reduced to reports about ‘service delivery protests’ which misunderstands why people are protesting in the first place because the only questions they are ever asked is whether they agree with the insiders that the government is to blame.

No News Is Bad News

But important as these prejudices are, they are only one of the ways in which media fail society and its democracy.

Very little media coverage of politics and society aims to inform citizens. It either seeks to make a political point – usually that the government is to blame– or to entertain. One example is the coverage, when there is any, of the municipal by-elections which are our only guide between national elections to how people are voting. Rarely if ever will the media offer an accurate guide to which parties are gaining support and which are losing it –  at most we may be told who won which wards which often does not tell us where voter loyalties are moving across the country.

More generally, any analysis which needs basic arithmetic is usually beyond the media. One current example is the media’s coverage of the claim of the official opposition that it is assembling a coalition which will relegate the ANC and EFF combined to the opposition benches. While there is painstaking coverage of which opposition parties are signing on, there is virtually none on what evidence we have that a DA which shed more support than the ANC at the last election can, with some smaller parties, achieve the 26% swing needed to achieve this. And this is not by any means the only example of a failure to take basic arithmetic into account when  supposedly covering political trends.

At the end of last year, those of us who were monitoring the ANC conference  were reminded of just how poor the media are at informing us. If you switched on a television the morning after nominations for the leadership positions, it would have taken you at least an hour and a half to discover who had been nominated and who had not. All the stations were too busy offering supposedly entertaining spectacle or the self-promotion of their journalists to tell us. Even greater disappointment awaits anyone who is hoping that the media will accurately tell them which laws are passing through Parliament and what they mean for citizens.

One huge irony is that a media in which criticising the government is a passport to respectability is often entirely unable to ask probing questions of politicians and government officials or to raise issues of concern which are not mentioned by politicians themselves or by lobby groups. Smirking or yelling at a politician is no substitute for asking them what many citizens want to know. But it is probably the only option when you don’t know what most citizens want to know.

There are several reasons why the media are failing citizens. One is a fixation on the digital media platforms on which insiders talk to each other – political news is what appears on Twitter, despite the fact that the vast majority of South Africans don’t use it. Another is a fixation on personalities and insider gossip – news is what politicians tell journalists either in public or in the form of leaks. The fact that the politicians are trying to advance their interests and that what they say may not be true is ignored.

A third is a culture in the media – particularly broadcasting – which assumes that a journalist’s job is to promote themselves and their opinions, not to tell people what is happening. It is common for interviews, which are meant to convey what a public figure or commentator think, to become lectures on what the interviewer thinks. When listeners to a radio station complained that a broadcaster was foisting their views on them rather than conveying the news, they were told that it was a news presenter’s job to tell everyone their opinions. It isn’t, of course, but the fact that the broadcaster claimed this shows how deeply embedded is the idea that being paid to sit in front of a microphone makes you an authority on a wide range of subjects.

A Real Problem?

So the media is not giving citizens the information we need to make the choices which democratic citizens should be able to make. How much does this matter? Is democracy here fatally damaged by poor media coverage of politics?

In some ways, the problem is not as serious as it seems. Firstly, the idea that media exercise an iron grip on the minds of the people is wildly overstated. This country is a very good example – for the last decade at least, anything from 45% to 57% of voters have supported a governing party who the media despise. Whether you believe the media are right or wrong to hold that view is not the point. But it is clear that a very large section of the citizenry does not allow the media to tell them what to think.

Secondly, a sizeable number of people, including many who take part in political debate, don’t rely on the traditional media for their information and analysis. The dawn of cyberspace gives them a range of websites and other on-line sources which enable them to ignore print and broadcast media

But the weakness of the media is still a problem.

While people may not rely on media to tell them who or what to support, they do need accurate and reliable information. Our experiences may tell us more than the media can but, if we are to make full use of the rights democracy offers us, we cannot rely on our experiences alone. We must know what is happening around us and we need media who can tell us. You can’t become angry about the murder of shack dweller leaders if you don’t know that it is happening or about a new proposed law if you don’t know it is being passed and you can’t sometimes make the best use of your vote unless you know how the parties are faring.

And, while some of us  enjoy the luxury of taking the media with a pinch of salt because we have other sources, most are not that lucky. The vast majority of South Africans still rely on traditional media, broadcasting in particular, to give them the information they need.

If we put these two realities together, the chief harm which the traditional media do is to deepen the inequalities in our politics by ensuring that only some of us can find the information that we need while others are denied it. This may be one of the reasons two-thirds of the country is shut out of politics. In any democracy, there are always some who have an unfair advantage because they have information of which others are starved. But that does not make it any less of a problem – here or anywhere else.

Democracy here will not reach anything like its potential if some of us have the information we need while most are forced to rely on a media which will not give it to them. Which is why the media’s failure to do what democracy needs it to do is a problem for all of us, even those of us who don’t need the media to tell us what is happening around us.

Prof Steven Friedman is a research professor at the University of Johannesburg, faculty of humanities, politics department, and writes in his personal capacity.