CAPE TOWN — One could argue that contesting outrageously false claims made for obvious political gain is a waste of journalistic time. That’s a narrow and naïve view because it assumes that most South Africans have a similar perspective and can recognise bull-dust, even when it appears in a very large cloud. They can’t. It’s always been about hearts and minds – ask the Nats. I’d venture to suggest that a qualitative and quantitative poll across all income groups and political allegiances would probably show most voters accept Chief Whip Mthembu’s claim that the media failed to appear before the TRC. Here Ed Herbst contributes a telling counterfoil to Mthembu’s claim that in this ‘failure,’ they showed their readers and fellow citizens, ‘the middle finger,’ effectively telling them to ‘go to hell’. That’s recognisable emotive political rhetoric. The question is: recognised by whom? Belief systems inform all sorts of behaviour, not the least of which is an outright denial of truth. The additional value of Herbst’s piece is in a fairly dispassionate assessment of the contributions the media have made to democracy; now and in the past, and a comparison of its regulation and capture under first, the NP and then the ANC. – Chris Bateman
By Ed Herbst*
“Don’t buy City Press, don’t buy! – Jackson Mthembu defending President Jacob Zuma outside the Goodman Gallery on 29/5/2012
Mthembu said the majority of South African media houses had refused to make submissions to the TRC and this refusal led to the “suspicion” and “mistrust” that existed between the media and those who fought for freedom.
“The media was complicit in the evils that took place in this country and like PW Botha‚ did not appear before the TRC. They showed the people of South Africa the middle finger and said go to hell.” – Jackson Mthembu. – Times Live 4/8/2017
Julius Malema, for obvious reasons, has given the bibulous ANC chief whip and well-known freedom of expression proponent the nickname of ‘Jack Daniels’. So, when Jackson Mthembu claimed at the Daily Maverick debate in Cape Town last week that the media, with the exception of the Argus Group had, ‘like P W Botha’, not appeared before the TRC, I wondered whether he had been at the sauce again.
Contrary, to Mthembu’s assertion, the media did appear before and make submissions to the TRC and, much like a Cape Times front page lead about Helen Zille having employed a ‘spook with a grabber’, his assertion was devoid of truth.
Mthembu called during the Daily Maverick debate for the media to hold its own Truth and Reconciliation Commission and to apologise to the country for the role in played during the apartheid era. He seems unaware of the role that the Rand Daily Mail and the Sunday Express had played in bringing down the Vorster administration with their Info Scandal revelations.
He also implied that the media did not and is not fighting for freedom. He should have asked Joe Thloloe about that and, should he seek more information in that regard, he can talk to the bereaved kith and kin of Suna Venter – all part of the ANC’s ‘good story to tell.
Questioning whether the media had the ‘moral and political authority’ to regulate itself, he called for an independent authority which would ‘hold the media accountable’ and called on parliament, where the ANC has an overwhelming majority, to investigate and presumably implement a ‘media tribunal.’
Even if he wasn’t four sheets to the wind, talking about ‘moral authority’ is somewhat impertinent coming from someone whose employer was responsible for the Shell House and Marikana massacres, looting the country into junk status, snouting more than R4 billion in Arms Deal kickbacks because they did not ‘…join the Struggle to remain poor’, Nkandla and Guptagate, putting dozens of municipalities into business administration, paying a bribe to ensure that South Africa won the bid for the 2010 Fifa Soccer World Cup, ignoring preventative maintenance for twenty years, more than 300 000 preventable HIV-Aids deaths, hundreds of depraved farm murders where neither children nor the frail elderly are spared, South African soldiers dying in the DRC to protect the mining interests of Zuma’s family members and cohorts, causing mines to close and foreign manufacturers to flee, murdering dozens of its own in the internecine battle to access the slate and the trough, giving every possible support to Robert Mugabe and not only inviting Omar al Bashir to this country but assisting him to flee when arrest threatened, thereby justifying the international perception that we are a ‘Despot’s Democracy’.
Attacking the messenger was Mthembu’s best shot at diverting attention from the tightening Guptagate noose or, as Ranjeni Munusamy put it in the Sunday Times:
While the judicial commission into state capture remains on ice pending Zuma’s review application to overturn former Public Protector Thuli Madonsela’s report, Mthembu believes it is necessary for journalists to apologise for what our dead or aging colleagues did during the apartheid era.
Given the fact that the media did apologise to the TRC, I wondered – if Mthembu was not tippled – whether he was suffering from that pervasive ailment among National Party and ANC politicians known as ERA – ‘Expedient Retrospective Amnesia’.
Or, if he was not in the Grip of the Grape, whether his memory lapse could be attributed to the fact that many parliamentary advisers and his fellow ANC politicians were on lucrative ‘fact-finding’ trips abroad and there was nobody at home to brief him before his most recent public appearance.
Mthembu needs reminding that Johan Pretorius and Louis Raubenheimer, both senior news executives in the apartheid-era SABC, testified before the TRC on 15 September 1997 and close to a hundred Naspers journalists signed a joint TRC declaration apologising ‘ …for the role that Naspers journalists played in building and maintaining Apartheid hegemony.’ The Argus Group, as Mthembu acknowledges, also made a submission.
Witch-hunt
Subsequent to that, of course, the media was exposed to an ANC-approved witch-hunt in 2000 against the ‘racist media’. The avatar of this venomous but ultimately inconsequential South African Human Rights Commission campaign, driven by Barney Pityana and Christine Qunta, was a marabou stork and a crow perched on a refuse bin in Kampala, Uganda. When no evidence of racism in the media could be found they settled for ‘subliminal racism’.
The Nats went to exceptional lengths, particularly in terms of their State of Emergency laws, to hobble the press – Section 3(5)(a) of the Media Emergency Regulations, 1988 made it an offence to publish newspaper articles which had blacked-out sections or blank spaces which made censorship obvious.
Such measures are a lot more difficult to implement in a constitutional democracy which places a strong emphasis on media freedom and freedom of expression. The current lobbying by the ANC for a Media Tribunal is, however, motivated by the same goal that the Nats had – to control or, better still, curb the flow of information which is detrimental to it.
To put lipstick on the apartheid pig, Eschel Rhoodie, with the help of John Vorster and Connie Mulder, diverted money from a secret SADF fund to establish one local newspaper, The Citizen.
Anything the Nats could do the ANC can do better and so R1.2 billion – and counting – was made available from the PIC account to give control of almost two dozen newspapers to Iqbal Survé who, like his staff, is as enthusiastic about the ANC as Eschel Rhoodie was about the National Party.
Our history keeps repeating itself and, on top of that, tens of millions of rands, with ANC approval, was diverted from taxpayer-funded SOE’s like Eskom and the SABC to assist the Gupta’s media ventures.
Like the Nats before them, the ANC constantly threatens litigation against the media – as Zapolean did with Zapiro.
And, like the Nats before them, they have the same problem – a lack of credibility.
Controlling the media
One is puzzled by the ANC obsession with punishing or controlling the media because large and influential sections of the media with huge audience reach answer to the ANC anyway.
In the Mbeki era the SABC, under the aegis of ANC acolytes like Snuki (Zero-sum) Zikalala, Christine Qunta and Thami Mazwai, oversaw a system of pervasive censorship by omission and in the Zuma era, under the aegis of ANC acolytes like Faith Muthambi, Ellen Tshabalala, Hlaudi Motsoeneng and Jimi Matthews, the same oppressive situation has prevailed.
Atul Gupta controls news output at the New Age and ANN7 with an iron fist and much the same situation seems to prevail at Independent Media given the experience of Alide Dasnois and Wally Mbhele.
ANC acolytes
Another problem for Mthembu’s hoped-for media tribunal is that unlike the apartheid-era journalists who testified before the TRC, the current crop of ANC acolytes in the media seem somewhat more reticent about submitting themselves to cross-examination under oath or being questioned in public.
Not only did Snuki Zikalala decline to appear at the court hearing brought by the FXI about to his blacklisting efforts he did not, as the judge remarked, even submit a written statement in his defence – and his supporters like Qunta and Mazwai were also not in court to demonstrate solidarity.
Iqbal Survé also had the opportunity to testify in public and under oath in the Labour Court case brought against him in May last year by Alide Dasnois for his gentlemanly, chivalrous and decidedly unchauvinistic behaviour towards her. He exercised the Zikalala option and declined – just as he declined the opportunity offered to him to participate in the Daily Maverick media debate last week.
Joe Thloloe, veteran Struggle journalist and former ombudsman for the SA Press Council, led a panel discussion at The Gathering about the role of the media in contemporary South African society.
He has always countered the ANC’s obsession – like the Nats before them – with media control by his contention that self-regulation through the SA Press Council, is efficient and effective.
In this regard, he was distressed when first Atul Gupta and then Iqbal Survé removed their newspapers from a system which held them accountable.
Investigative journalism
There is, incidentally, an interesting contrast between the investigative journalism which characterised the Info Scandal and the investigative journalism which has prevailed in the current Guptagate scandal.
Former Naspers chairman, Ton Volsoo, says the Afrikaans press made a big mistake in leaving the investigation of the Info Scandal to English newspapers like the Rand Daily Mail under Allister Sparks who used his reporters Chris Day and Mervyn Rees to good effect.
Fast forward to 2015 -2016 and it is Afrikaans reporters like Pieter-Louis Myburgh and Stefaans Brummer of the amaBunghane Centre for Investigative Journalism who are leading the field in investigating the Guptagate scandal. This, while the biggest group of English newspapers, the Independent News Media company of Iqbal Survé, is making comparatively little, if any, contribution of consequence in exposing this scandal.
There is, of course a big difference between the Rand Daily Mail then and Newspaper House (home in Cape Town’s CBD to the Cape Times and the Cape Argus) now.
While Allister Sparks took Day and Rees off the RDM daily news diary, gave them an unlimited budget and allowed them to focus exclusively on the big story of the day, a leading Newspaper House investigative reporter like Tony Weaver suffered systematic persecution and public humiliation – unprecedented in South African newspaper history – after the Sekunjalo takeover until he resigned. This was because he refused to adapt to or accommodate the Fake News value system and ethos adopted by the Cape Times and Cape Argus under the new Iqbal Survé-appointed editors. As a result, Indy reporters have not featured in the annual Taco Kuiper investigative journalism awards since the Sekunjalo takeover and the company has seen the exodus of more than a hundred of its senior news personnel in just three years.
UNISA academic, Dr Julie Reid, has argued eloquently that the world’s leading democracies favour media self-regulation. One can but hope that after a strong tincture or two (but not too many) and after reading the university’s 2011 submission to the Press Freedom Commission, Jackson Mthembu will come to similar insights and that he will help steer the Despot’s Democracy in that direction.
In closing: I was unable to attend the Daily Maverick function at the Cape Town International Convention Centre last week. A resident in the retirement home where I live did attend and she returned hugely enthused. She said the place was packed to the rafters – she estimates close on 2000 people – and said it was exciting to listen to political, business and media luminaries who she had only read about in the past. Jack Daniels, she said, did not acquit himself well as he evasively ducked, dived and obfuscated while answering the questions posed by Stephen Grootes.
- Ed Herbst is a retired veteran journalist who writes in his own capacity.
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