Yes, Mr President! The media are out of touch with the society in which they exist!

Perhaps South Africa is the only democracy on the continent and the whole world that allows an oppositional press, especially print, to operate in a way that undermines the goals and gains of almost 400 years of liberation struggle.

This black government (sic) is the only one that I know in contemporary history that allows a press that is “out of sync” with the genuine aspirations and hope of the majority to operate as a powerful force, especially among the elite.

It would seem the press exists, primarily, to insult elected political leadership openly and undermine its integrity in the name of freedom of expression.

Every day of our lives we have a press that is calling for the overthrow of an African, primitive, uncultured and corrupt government by passive resistance or just plain dismissal.

The current Eishkom rolling power failures have worsened the situation by making people who believe everything they read in the press bolder in uttering racist statements about the failures of a black government (See Ivo Vegter: “Vindication for the racists“.)

You need no rocket science to see and understand that white-controlled business — which provides the life blood for the media — has entrusted the press with the responsibility to attack the integrity of the government constantly.

Thus many of the so-called leading commentators, public intellectuals, columnists and editors make up an influential intellectual mercenary army whose primary role and responsibility is to be stuck in permanent attack-dog mode: poor service delivery, Aids, Zimbabwe, unemployment, crime and corruption!

Mind you, there is no mention of racism, land dispossession, wealth monopoly, profit-mongering corporations or greedy multinationals.

They are funded by so-called private enterprise, partly openly and partly covertly (you only need to check the ad spend and sponsorship) by shareholders and institutions who do not desire to see economic transformation or black African political domination in the country.

It has never happened before in the history of a democracy. Even the British colonialists and the Afrikaner apartheid regimes would never tolerate anything like that for one second.

It still does not happen in today’s America, Russia or Britain, for that matter, where only “embedded journalism” is now the order of the day.

There is nothing wrong with freedom of speech or the press, per se. In this beautiful country it is, of course, protected and guaranteed by the 1996 Constitution.

But there is no freedom of speech or the press for the African majority who believe in and continue to support the ruling party, if you think about it. In fact, their voices are conspicuous by their absence in the mainstream press.

The media, especially print, can be considered, rightly or wrongly, the last bastion of white resistance to black African majority rule.

A close scrutiny of its production system — especially the behind-the-scenes sub-editing and editorial management ranks – shows that it continues to be flooded and dominated by unreconstructed white conservatives and political incorrigibles.

Remember, there may be more black faces that are the editorial face of most publications in the country but most people don’t know that true power that determines editorial content and ideological slant lies with the invisible white power ghosts in production and middle-management ranks.

What you read may be written by a black but it will, inevitably, have been filtered through a white, racist prism.

Thus the ideology and information flow that dominates the public consciousness of newspaper and magazine readers in the country is still controlled and determined by white power and prejudice.

Ironically, the “out of sync” level of the press in South Africa in the past 13 years has reached unprecedented proportions.

There has never been a time in the 400 years of South African political history that a popular and legitimate democratic government has been subjected to incessant assault to insult its political leadership openly and undermine its integrity.

Without apologising for the sins of the political fathers and mothers, this is what has happened to the post-Polokwane leadership, for instance, that has been called all sorts of names: rapists, fraudsters, criminals, robbers.

It is remarkable that support for the ruling party has dramatically increased in the elections of both 1999 and 2004.

The press had written off Africa’s oldest liberation movement by identifying and exaggerating the media-created groundswell of disillusionment with alleged lack of delivery or corruption, for instance.

The most recent media anti-establishment game, which is still going on, has been the outright condemnation of Jacob Zuma as a non-starter for leadership material of both the ruling party and the government.

In fact, the media had long declared him a loser before the Polokwane conference, right?
Let’s suppose the media were not “out of sync” with the thinking and feeling of the people on the ground but intuitively connected to the legitimate aspirations and hopes of the majority.

So: they would have commentators, public intellectuals, columnists and editors who would have known and understood the feeling of “the people”, especially at branch level. Right?

To give a true reflection of society, they would not have allowed themselves to be trained and manipulated by white conservative opinion to get into permanent attack-dog mode that would dismiss the choice of the majority. Right?

Of course, it is always easy to understand why pale natives will continue to report like foreigners in their own country: they do not understand black Africans because they neither speak their political language nor live among them.

Also, they have no respect for primitive, backward, uneducated, criminal and corrupt African leadership. Right?

The fact of the matter is: the media-manufactured content does not, largely, reflect the political reality of the black African experience or the choice of “the people”.

Of course, the recent ANC Today letter from the president was not an exhaustive argument to “prove” that, yes, the media “is out of sync with the society it exists in”.

But there is a large dose of truth in that observation, even if it is said by a popular-choice leader that the media do not take seriously.

Okay, suppose that the media continue to be “out of sync” with developments and trends in the country, especially among the grassroots. What will happen?

I suppose one way to check it out would be for the press to publish reports prominently on newspaper and magazine buying and readership trends. Of course, it is an open secret now how sales figures are, sometimes, falsified.

But what is important to note is that, increasingly, critical-minded people are cynical about what the media have to say about what is going on in the country.

It is now common to hear them say: “Look, who has got time to read white-sponsored black columnists whose agenda is to be hostile to a popular and legitimate black government? These guys and dolls have no clue about what is going on in their own country.”
I suppose the media can continue enjoying their constitutional right to freedom of expression.

After all, the much-lauded columnists and public intellectuals are not with the people and do not write for the people or about the people, but for each other.

Oh, yeah, the media themselves do not, for instance, reflect the demographics of the country. Indeed, they are out of sync with the society in which they exist!