Take two aspirin and call in the morning

It is an affliction that arrives seasonally. To those of its victims inclined towards drama it always seems far worse than it really is. However, it is rarely fatal and mostly passes without permanent damage.

No, no, not the flu. I mean the annually resuscitated enthusiasm of the African National Congress for media restrictions, or as they would phrase it, regulations to encourage “responsible” journalism.

Paradoxically, it is the fractious tripartite alliance’s enthusiasm for Byzantine plots, cabals and character assassination that helps ensure the flow of supposedly confidential information to the media. The ANC is a government which, like any in the world, has a vested interest in keeping things secret. Simultaneously, however, within the alliance are various oppositional groupings vying for control of that selfsame government, all of which have a vested interest in exposing at least some of the dirty secrets to gain advantage over their rivals. No matter how they grouse, politicians in a democracy need a free media.

It is also ironic that the government is again calling for a tribunal to can bring the press to heel, when it is the ANC itself that demonstrably most often acts to subvert the principles of a free and fair media.

It is an ANC faction that allegedly paid a journalist to boost former Western Cape premier, Ebrahim Rassool, and undermine his party rivals. It is the state broadcaster that allegedly instructed journalists not to interview former President Thabo Mbeki because it “undermined” his successor, President Jacob Zuma.

And it is the contending Mbeki and Zuma factions that happily smear one another with leaks to the media of sensitive snippets that have been garnered by the intelligence services. Some of the biggest political exposures of the past half dozen years have not come from journalistic hard work but from ANC internecine warfare.

So for ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe to bemoan the “dearth of media ethics” is a canard. The proposed media regulations have as much to do with ethics as the “Secrecy Bill” has to do with the “protection of information” that is its official title. That is to say, nothing.

Mantashe gives it away when he explained at a recent business breakfast on the topic “How solid is our democracy?” that the “underlying subtext” of such questions was premised on the belief that the ANC under Zuma was not “up to the task” and would send SA into a downward spiral. This perception was “devoid of any truth” and was cultivated by a media that constantly focused on “negativity” and “resented national success”.

Given the media’s enthusiastic and sometimes uncritical celebration of SA’s World Cup success, Mantashe’s comment seems peculiarly ill-timed. Fact is, it has nothing to do with patriotism.

The ANC cannot abide the inherently sceptical and irreverent nature of the media, something politicians in the other democracies have had to reconcile themselves to, because it believes that the media should be in-spanned to achieve a nation’s goals, which it defines as synonymous with those of the ruling party. The media, in the tripartite alliance’s agenda, is a tool to help achieve the ANC’s so-called national democratic revolution.

Predictably, the media is reacting to these recent ANC threats like a scalded cat instead of with the yawn that all this deserves. For whatever the control fetish of the ANC, government actually has little room for manoeuvre, for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, it is constrained by the Constitution and a judiciary that increasingly has ruled in favour of disclosure, against control and secrecy. Yes, the bench can be packed but that is a creeping threat, rather than an immediate problem.

Secondly, in a wired world censorship is almost impossible. Publication on a website combined with emails and Twitter can reach vastly bigger audiences than a print publication and, best of all in terms of bolting stable doors, it happens almost instantaneously.

In the light of these realities, the ANC’s regular claims of media “conspiracies” and threats of tribunals should be seen for what they are. A bullying bluster, as predictable and dangerous as seasonal sniffles.