Fight for Democracy - Glenda Daniels

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can develop, even when ‘there is supposedly common language’. Words do not have universal meanings, but change over time and at any given moment the same word can hold different meanings. Pecheux, according to Macdonell argued that meanings are part of the ‘ideological sphere’ and discourse is one of ideology’s principal forms.

      The interview method, which comprises a reflective commentary, was an important component of my research. A sample of journalists from the English-speaking newspaper media was interviewed. They were over the age of thirty-five and were able to look, in perceptive ways, backwards to their days as reporters under apartheid, during the transition to the new dispensation, to the present, and forwards to the future. A selection of media academics, lawyers and non-governmental activists was also interviewed.

      Other sources of information came from newspapers; letters from the public as an indication of the views of civil society and citizenry; academic journals; Letters from the President in ANC Today; statements from media bodies including the FXI and Misa; and official policy documents, as well as attendance at and recordings of panel discussions and seminars on media freedom such as the Right2Know Campaign launch and colloquium. Media figures from the ANC’s communications department, as well as the SACP intellectual Jeremy Cronin were interviewed on the subject of developmental journalism. These interviews and recordings enriched the project with ‘real, live’ voices from South Africa’s unfolding democracy.

      The theoretical conceptual research method I adopted aims to deepen our understanding of the significance to a democratic society of a self-regulating and independent media. Is political philosophy and theory pie in the sky? Butler (2000: 265) also questioned the value of theory. She turned to Aristotle, who had reflected: ‘As the saying goes, the action that follows deliberation should be quick, but deliberation slow’. The philosophical arguments between Butler, Žižek and Laclau are united by their foundation: they are ‘motivated by a desire for a radically more restructured world, one which would have economic equality and political enfranchisement imagined in much more radical ways than they are’ (op. cit.: 277). However, the question is how to make the translations between philosophical commentary in the field of politics and the re-imagining of political life. My work is motivated by a commitment: to media freedom, to wanting to see this aspect of life in South Africa flourish, believing that media independence makes a difference to the deepening of the unfolding and unrealised democracy.

      As I use terms ‘the ANC’, ‘the media’, ‘the social’ ‘independence’ and ‘free’, I acknowledge that these organisations, terms and entities are split, and not unified. I have used the terms ‘independence’ and ‘free’ while acknowledging that ‘the media’, can only be relatively free and independent. It has to be responsible and accountable to the public, qua the citizenry, plus its readers, viewers and listeners’ to the Constitution; and to its code of professional ethics. And so I have to agree with Ramphele’s opening quotation to this chapter, that gratitude for liberation should not mean unending gratitude to the leading movement in that process. It would be irresponsible and a shirking of one’s duty to entrust the future of society solely to a party, or parties, associated with the liberation struggle.

      NOTES

      1Dr Mamphela Ramphele, from a speech made at the University of Cape Town at the launch of the Open Society Monitoring Index (‘House of Freedom is open to all’, Mail & Guardian, 13-19 August 2010).

      2‘Interpellation’ means naming, hailing, labelling, calling and subjecting that person to that name, for example: lesbian, black, white, racist. Ideological interpellations are demands or social injunctions with the aim of subjecting and making the subject toe the line – the subject becomes the subject by heeding the call, acknowledging the hailing – for example, ‘enemy of the people’.

      3The point de capiton, in Žižek, is a knot, an upholstery button, which pins down or ties up meaning to avoid slippages and slidings.

      4Had the law been in place at the time, the following stories would not have been published legally according to experts polled in August 2010: the Oilgate story about the payment of R11 million in PetroSA money by a private company to the ANC’s 2004 election campaign; a story on the link between the wife of minister of state security, Siyabonga Cwele, and an international cocaine ring; a story on the SABC wasting R49 million on dud shows; and the 2007 exposé of baby deaths at the Mount Frere hospital in the Eastern Cape (see Sunday Times: ‘Read all about the info bill’: 15 August 2010).

      5He was in possession of an apparently fraudulent letter of resignation, which the premier of Mpumalanga, David Mabuza, was supposed to have penned to the president. The letter was subsequently traced back to the premier’s office and it would seem that the journalist had become a victim of power politics in the province of Mpumalanga. The arrest of Wa Afrika was a sign of sheer intimidation (see Mail & Guardian: ‘Sin doctor red faced over fake letter and the nine lives of Wa Afrika’: 13-19 August 2010).

      6The use of the term ‘transitional’ raises the question, of course, of transitional from what to what? I use the term in a Derridean way: democracy is never fully realised; it is constantly unfolding. That is what Derrida meant when he wrote ‘democracy to come’ which means that democracy is a philosophical concept ‘an inheritance of a promise’. In On the Political Mouffe writes that democracy is something uncertain and improbable and must never be taken for granted. In The Democratic Paradox she offers that the moment of realisation of democracy would see its disintegration. I use the terms unfolding democracy and transitional democracy, then, in this Derridean and Mouffian sense.

      7It was Essop Pahad, formerly minister in Mbeki’s presidency and subsequently publisher and editor of The Thinker, who said in a speech at a colloquium at Wits University, Media Freedom and Regulation, on 15 September 2010, that the ANC found the way ‘the Info Bill and the Media Tribunal was being linked is hysterical’.

      8In Contingency, Hegemony and Universality Žižek explains the famous Marx brothers joke about ‘coffee or tea?’. ‘Yes, please!’ It is a refusal of choice.

      The relationship between the media and democracy

      Secrecy obstructs democracy by keeping the public ignorant of information that it needs to make wise policy choices.1

      This chapter argues that the media is a legitimate adversary – rather than an enemy of the people – in a fluid, changing and unrealised imperfect democracy. The ‘free’ press (and ‘free’ is used here in the sense of free from political interference, control and state intervention, not from economic, cultural or social interference) poses something of a challenge to the ruling alliance’s hegemonic discourse, with its desire to limit the polymorphic voices of a diverse media.

      A dissonance has crept in between the Constitution’s ascription to independence of the media on the one hand and the government and state’s actions on the other, creating tension in the relationship between the media and the ANC. One of the ANC’s main problems with the media is what it conceives as inadequate and negative representation of its views as the ruling party. For example, at the launch of the ANC’s online publication ANC Today in 2001, the ‘Letter from the President’ noted:

      Historically the national and political constituency represented by the ANC has had very few and limited mass media throughout the ninety years of its existence. During this period, the commercial newspaper and magazine press representing the views, values and interests of the white minority has dominated the field of the mass media. This situation has changed only marginally in the period since we obtained our liberation in 1994 (ANC Today: 26 January-1 February 2001).

      One of the issues raised throughout this book is the compulsion of these discursive interventions, which are in many respects inappropriate to a constitutional democracy. While tension between the ruling party and the media is not a recent development, it became increasingly pronounced during the first decade of the new millennium and at the ANC National Policy Conference in Polokwane in December 2007 when a media appeals tribunal to regulate the media was proposed. This occurred against the backdrop of the ANC wanting

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