Fight for Democracy - Glenda Daniels

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itself as the noble liberation movement. It summoned two outrageously undemocratic ‘solutions’ to deal with the ‘problem’. Under the guise of ‘development’, ‘transformation’, ‘rights to dignity’, and maybe even ‘the second transition’ there is something highly ideological and seriously political afoot: the desire for political control through curbs on access to information. This argument proceeds that the ANC does not want the party’s internal divisions and problems hung out for the public to see; it does not want the inadequacy of service delivery exposed; and it finds the corruption within its ranks embarrassing.

      Legislative curbs and muzzling would spell doom for democracy but nonetheless, alongside the gloomy picture there are civil society forces rallying against this authoritarianism creeping in to steal democracy. As Nic Dawes, editor of the Mail & Guardian, aptly wrote in his end-of-year freedom essay: ‘It is a fragile creature, and new, but the ANC’s fear and rage may be giving birth to a politics more threatening to its hegemony than any lurid caricatures of its paranoiac imagination’ (Mail & Guardian: 23 December 2011-5 January 2012).

      In its attempts to cover up its own failings, the ruling party uses obfuscation and some serious ideological social fantasies, and projects many of its internal problems onto a robust press. For this reason, I have employed psychoanalytical concepts such as hysteria, fantasy, gaze, surplus and excess to explain the issues in the various case studies that have occurred since the advent of democracy. While democracy is fragile, there are optimistic moments lying side by side with pessimistic moments. The ultimate point is that a critical and robust press plays a significant role in keeping the spaces open for the deepening of democracy and it must be left alone to do its job.

      ABREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

ANC African National Congress
ANCYL ANC Youth League
BEE black economic empowerment
BDFM Business Day/Financial Mail
Cosatu Congress of South African Trade Unions
DA Democratic Alliance
FBJ Forum of Black Journalists
FXI Freedom of Expression Institute
GEAR Growth, Employment and Redistribution
Idasa Institute for Democracy in South Africa
IPS Inter Press Service News Agency
Misa Media Institute of South Africa
MMA Media Monitoring Africa
NCOP National Council of Provinces
NAIL New African Investments Limited
PFC Press Freedom Commission
SABC South African Broadcasting Corporation
SACP South African Communist Party
SAHRC South African Human Rights Commission
Sanef South African National Editors’ Forum
TAC Treatment Action Campaign

      The ANC and the media post-apartheid

      Gratitude for liberation should not mean unending gratitude to the leading movement in that process. It is very human to be caught in the seductive embrace of one’s liberators, but it is irresponsible and shirking one’s duty to continue to entrust the future of one’s society solely to a party or parties associated with the liberation struggle.1

      The role of the news media in South Africa’s democracy presents a paradox, a historically created conundrum: the South African media finds itself subjected to the ruling party’s desire for more unity and consensus in the country’s fractured society. The desire of the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC) would be met if there was a more supportive and loyal press but the press finds compliance with this desire out of kilter with its professional code of ethics, its role of holding power to account, loyalty to the citizenry, exposing abuses of power and being a ‘watchdog’ in the unfolding democracy. The historically created conundrum consists of the ‘logic’ that because the ANC led the liberation struggle and was democratically elected it deserves a more sympathetic press. But as Mamphela Ramphele has noted in the opening quotation to this chapter, it would be irresponsible to be ‘caught in the embrace of one’s liberators’, and then arguably in support of a media independent from political control she averred that ‘we must guard against the closing of the mind and inward turning of the gaze that leads to tyranny … We need to know how open our society is so that we have a yardstick against which to measure South Africa’s progress in creating an open society.’ Since 1994, prominent members of the ANC have, to varying degrees, conceptualised the media as an ‘us and them’, or in a matrix which positions the media as outside democracy. Yet the tensions are internal to, and inherent in, democracy itself.

      This opening chapter provides an introduction which is thematically grounded in political philosophy. In their 1985 work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argued that democracy is secured precisely through its resistance to realisation, a foundational point which has been accepted by the key political philosophical works of the three authors whose perspectives have guided this book: Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler and Chantal Mouffe. Laclau and Mouffe stated that the different political spaces, and the plurality of such spaces, are part and parcel of the deepening of a democratic order. Within this multiplicity of open spaces there are contestations, changing meanings and constant flux. Difference, rather than unity of opinion, is therefore necessary in any democratic transition. Dissension should be accepted, and those who criticise should be viewed as legitimate adversaries rather than as enemies. This is how a radical democracy is generated, according to Mouffe in The Democratic Paradox. One of my central arguments is that the media is one such space or platform for a diversity of views but, even more importantly, it is a medium for the questioning of meaning in politics. Running through this book is the thread that journalists are not ‘enemies of the people’ or outsiders in a democracy. On the contrary, they play a critical and essential role in the deepening of democracy. Democracy, in this book, is a floating signifier, which denotes that it does not have full meaning (a ‘signifier’ is more than a mere sign but stands for, or represents, the subject – and a floating signifier, then, is a signifier with no fixed meaning).

      The intersection between the independent media (that is, the news media – journalism, news reporting, analysis and political commentary) and democracy in an unrealised democracy is under scrutiny, the aim of which is to preserve the ideal of democracy, to ward off dissolution, and also hopefully to inform action or activism to halt the whittling away of the ‘free’ space of the media (by ‘free’, here, is meant relatively free, relatively autonomous and relatively independent, with the focus on relative freedom from political pressures and state interference).

      The South African media professes to play a vital role in entrenching the articles of the Constitution, ensuring a transparent democracy which holds public officials accountable for their decisions and actions and exposes the abuse of power and corruption by ruling elites. The questions are to do with the concept of democracy and its realisation; the tension between the two constitutive

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