London - As we observe Black Wednesday today, South Africans can be assured that in general the country’s media landscape, according to the International Press Freedom Index 2022 published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), remains “sturdy, diverse and dynamic”.
The fact that no journalist or media worker in South Africa has been killed and none are in prison because of their work since January 2022 underlines the robustness of the 1996 constitutional protection of press freedom which, in turn, has inculcated a well-established culture of investigative journalism often exposing scandals involving powerful figures.
This in contrast to the aggregate 49 killed and 524 currently in prison worldwide.
For the benefit of the current and future generations of our youth, it remains imperative to remind them that Black Wednesday marks that horrific day on October 19, 1977, when the South African press experienced its version of Kristallnacht when apartheid minister of police and justice Jimmy Kruger unleashed a violent pogrom arresting several black editors, journalists and activists, and banned a spate of publications and organisations.
It came in the aftermath of the 1976 Soweto uprisings and a month after the brutal murder in detention of Steve Biko, leader of the Black Consciousness Movement, to which Kruger demonically retorted, “Dit laat my koud”. Instead of breaking the spirit of non-racial journalism, it reinforced it.
Some 28 years into a democratic South Africa, Black Wednesday, while steeped in apartheid atrocities which must never be forgotten, has assumed a newfound nuance related to a changing press freedom landscape, diverse international media ownership and an unregulated global social media.
It continues also to unleash a cornucopia of challenges to democratic South Africa and its foreign relations and the polarising politics of race, class, envy and inequality which still seem to consume the socio-political discourse in the country.
“Political tension,” observes RSF, “sometimes gives rise to disinformation or smear campaigns against media outlets, especially on social media. The ruling ANC has at times resorted to such campaigns, but those waged by the EFF, one of the opposition parties, are by far the most virulent. Its leaders and supporters do not hesitate to incite violence and accuse certain journalists of racism.”
Not exactly an endorsement of Madiba’s heartfelt conviction that “a critical, independent and investigative press is the lifeblood of any democracy”, and crucial to the transformation of the then nascent democratic state.
There are, however, some worrisome trends relating to the media landscape. South Africa’s ranking in the International Press Freedom Index 2022 has slipped three places in 2022 to 35 out of 180 countries with a score of 75.56, compared with a 2021 ranking of 32 and a score of 78.41.
While journalists are rarely arrested in South Africa, they are faced with existential threats in carrying out their constitutional right to report news or circulate opinion without censorship from the government.
These threats include failure of the police sometimes to protect them when they are exposed to violence; the resurgence of verbal and physical attacks against journalists by political activists; the surveillance of investigative journalists by the state security agency; limited access to online news articles through paywalls for a segment of the readership that cannot afford to pay; the use of antiterrorism laws to limit reporting on institutions deemed to be in the “national interest” – equivalent to the D-Notice in the UK; the lack of development of small, independent media outlets because of prohibitive operating costs; and the alleged favouring by successive ANC governments, including the Ramaphosa regime, of certain media outlets through advertising expenditure.
To its credit, the Constitutional Court last year ordered changes to the law on intercepting communications in order to safeguard the confidentiality of journalists’ phone conversations and sources.
Madiba had a long-held universalist view of “freedom of press at home, freedom of press abroad” – the rights and media freedom we enjoy at home should also be promoted through Pretoria’s foreign cultural and economic policy, especially in those important countries with which the government is seeking to fast boost relations, including Saudi Arabia and China.
In this respect, there is no confirmation nor any statement of Ramaphosa raising the vexed issue of press freedom and human rights abuses in the kingdom when he paid a state visit to Saudi Arabia last weekend and wooed strongman Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jeddah, who the CIA said ordered the brutal slaying of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018.
In an era of superfast internet connectivity and IT communications, virtual reality, AI and metaverse, data and information reign supreme. Information is a valuable asset which can be monetised and used to influence and even control the masses, irrespective of political and economic status.
Never mind the niceties and feigned “innocence” of Western democracies. Their media are past masters at setting the narrative on national and global issues depending on the colour of their politics and funding for centuries.
Each Black Wednesday must be a reminder of the struggle for hard-fought press freedoms and the Struggle against apartheid.
Some of the alternatives today are terrifying – a choice between weaponising information and the media à la “Fox Newsisation”, which poses a fatal danger for democracies because it undermines the basis of civil harmony and tolerant public debate, and state-controlled media in authoritarian countries that eliminate their citizens’ right to information and suppresses the very free press that Madiba so passionately espoused.
Parker is a writer based in London
Cape Times