Where is the media's tipping point?

What is the “tipping point” which sees the media deliberately shift from passive reporter to active crusader? What pushes the media into pro-active campaign mode deliberately making the news and not merely the quasi-objective spectator telling the world what’s happening, when, where, to who, why and how?

Precedents, great and small, exist galore. When I was crime reporter at the Pretoria News (along with Sej Motau) back in the late 1970s, the paper actively participated in the huge manhunt for the serial killer dubbed the “Muti Murderer”, helping detectives, publishing public-service tips, providing services so readers could provide the cops with information — making the news on which we then reported. Sej and I travelled to Pietersburg to hand over the reward the News had helped sponsor with Martin Jonker Motors to the 17-year-old who tipped off police and led to the capture of the killer (who was a seriously deranged police man, but whose name now eludes me). And we reported on that too.

Since then there have been thousands of similar campaigns — many for a frighteningly continuous stream of so-called “muti killers”. Primemedia’s “Helpline”, spearheaded by another former crime reporter, Yusuf Abramjee, immediately springs to mind. The anonymous SMS tip-off line has been phenomenally successful. By contrast our destitute judicial system has been phenomenally flaccid in putting any one of the more-than-600 suspects nabbed so far behind bars (when last I checked in January this year).

Other media from Kosi Bay to Koekenaap have also periodically donned the armour of cause journalism. But all these hundreds of campaigns have been parochial, localised or targeted towards a specific cause (farm murders or drug dealers). Noble and necessary, but ultimately disjointed and finite. Even in the face of South Africa’s perennial albatross — crime.

That is what makes the current burgeoning campaign spreading across the length and breadth of the US all the more remarkable. Obviously the “enemy” of this new-look cause journalism is the all-consuming financial crisis — a kind of “clear and present danger” to the Union not unlike that which would be posed should another nation attack America. In fact, war has been a common metaphor in media coverage of the financial crisis. “War” has also been used in SA in tackling crime. And unemployment, and HIV-Aids, and education, and racism, and …

Because virtually every American is being hit by the financial crisis (including visitors such as me), the nation has been galvanised into action and united across ancient barriers in ways unseen since the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour. More even, I would venture, than in the aftermath of 9/11. The mighty CNN has devoted an entire week’s coverage in every news and feature segment to what it has called the “Road to Rescue”. In other words, how the nation is going to rescue itself is the central theme no matter who is anchoring what programme. Other media are following suit to lesser degrees, but all are focusing sustained coverage — hard news, opinion and traditionally soft issues — on “how do we get out of this crisis?”

There are several intriguing lessons emerging, both for nations and for the media.

Solidarity of purpose is indispensable. The focus throughout is on constructive, pragmatic, realistic solutions, despite the fact that the most-hated people in America at present are the 70 or so as-yet-unnamed executives at AIG who will be splitting R1,67-billion in bonuses. Sound familiar? The best things those guys and gals could do right now is pick up the phone to Jacob Zuma and/or Kgalema Motlanthe and move to SA quicker than you can say “Jean-Bertrand Aristide”. Or Bob Mugabe.

All the same, the media are falling over themselves to provide every Joe (and Jane) the Plumber from Washington DC to Wormturd, Nebraska, with a platform for his or her homemade recipe for survival. Everyone is involved. Every medium is exploited to its fullest — Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blogs, SMSs, advertising, episodes of on-going soapies, Oprah, Jay Leno — whether just hopping on the grandwagon or sincere efforts, everyone in the US is involved.

Secondly, you need a leader. The US has one; SA does not. Simple. God willing, the US will keep its leader until the crisis is over. SA doesn’t have a hope in hell of getting one in place.

Thirdly, the unifying war must be a just one that every citizen can support. Americans do not see themselves fighting against the recession. They see themselves fighting for a real, palpable, desirable, credible, achievable future. That is not simplistic semantic legerdemain. The distinction is essential to achieve solidarity of purpose. Psychologists will tell you the human mind cannot conceptualise a negative. You cannot wrap your imagination around NOT being unemployed as little as you can not procrastinating, but you can visualise HAVING a job or doing something right now. This is why all efforts, no matter how well-financed or morally noble, to eradicate crime in SA are doomed to failure ab initio. All the nomenclature involved is negative.

And fourthly such a “national war” has to be balls-to-the-wall warfare. This is not some petty parliamentary pas de deux “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” as the Bard would say. The message here in Washington and across the country is “This is not a drill”. There are no sacred cows, no safe zones. That’s why the Obama administration is marshalling everyone from the attorney-general to the IRS to make those AIG performance bonuses as empty and insubstantial as possible. The bonuses themselves and their payment are almost untouchable, perfectly legitimate and contractually agreed to before Congress signed off on the R1,7-trillion bail-out deals for AIG. As Rick Newman of US News and World Report told CNN’s Rick Sanchez yesterday: “Sometimes the most egregious crimes are those that are quite legal.”

No one in their right mind would believe that would happen in SA today, the homeland of hubris and the open-hand-behind-the-back. While acknowledging Wall Street’s complicity in generating the Gordon Gekko dictum: “Greed is good”, the media have been at pains to point out that not every broker or investment banker is inherently crooked. In fact, they pointedly state most are “decent, honest, hard-working people of integrity”. Maybe there are a few decent, honest, hard-working people of integrity at Luthuli House, but 15 years of accumulated detritus and dogged, dodgy denialism would make that proposition a hard-sell.

To get back to the original question, maybe there isn’t a clearly identifiable tipping point which, once reached, sees the media become active driver and creator of news. Or at least not one we are able to define at this juncture in social evolution. I would welcome the views of those of greater erudition and intellectual perspicacity than I — the likes of Guy Berger, Anton Harber, Joe Thloloe, Dario Milo, Franz Kruger, Paula Fray, Susan Smuts, Ray Louw or Jane Duncan to name but a few. Maybe even Malcolm Gladwell who wrote the book The Tipping Point …

One thing though is indisputable, I am seeing in the US a national cohesion and consensus of opinion, effort and involvement — without any sacrifice of individual identity or integrity — that I have not seen in my motherland. Ever. And, at the risk of pushing an analogy too far, the media are the great wind that billows the sails of a thousand ships on their way to rescue their stolen princess. The American media are now both maker and reporter of events along the road to rescue. I wish I could see similar things in South Africa.