WHILE the media has contributed to a culture of democratic debate while playing a watchdog role to ensure accountability through investigative reporting into corruption and malfeasance, the role of media continues to draw criticism.
This, as some experts feel that newsrooms were being “weaponised” by the rich to serve their interests.
Many on various social media platforms continue to express their distrust in media, accusing newsrooms of bearing the characteristics of the extreme socio-economic inequalities in the country, with the digital and print media accused of serving mostly the elite.
Speaking to the Sunday Independent, senior communications lecturer at the University of Limpopo and independent political analyst, Dr Metji Makgoba, said the media had structural limitations and would always be the weapon of the white capital and some politicians who are ideologically aligned with the elite.
He stated that the owners of the mainstream media companies were aiding those with money, because the media was working with capitalist societies to advance the interests of the ruling elite.
“It is not that the media is interested in serving the public. Inherently, the media is political and always plays a political (role) in advancing certain interests of the elite.
“Some think this is about ethics, but you cannot have ethics in a society that is built on the oppression of certain racial and gendered people. Media pluralism has always been an alternative to resolving this media hegemony.
“However, in South Africa, such an arrangement is absent. The media establishment is liberal and, by extension, serves the interests of white supremacy, anti-black racism, and patriarchy.
“This liberalism in the country is working towards silencing pan-Africanist voices and that of the left. In particular, the media has worked to advance the unrealistic notions of rainbowism and post-racialism that assume that racism has ended with the advent of democracy and that anyone who has challenged these notions is treated as being crazy and stupid.
“If whiteness and white supremacy remain the normative vision of the South African press, which has long depoliticised race relations under the guise of non-racialism, journalists will continue to have problems with the left and the pan-Africanists who are seen as dividing the country,” he said.
Makgoba said many journalists, black people included, were not able to draw the difference between liberal politics of racism and structural racism.
He felt that other than targeting certain black professionals and progressive leaders, the media continued to de-historise and depoliticise social and cultural issues.
“While they claim to protect us from the left and black radicals, what the media is doing is protecting and maintaining the hegemonic structures of injustice which serve to preserve white interests and black elites.
“The struggle between the South African media and the left and black radicals is a bigger ideological struggle in which the former seeks to continue perpetuating unequal structures of power between whites and blacks, and categorical structural inequalities unfortunately at the expense of our people,” said Makgoba.
Makgoba’s analysis and sentiments resonated with the editor in Chief of Asia Democracy Chronicles Tess Bacalla, who said pushing narratives that distort meaningful public conversations has become an integral, albeit destructive, component of the strategies that have been used by many for ages.
“Narrative, after all, is power, especially when used – calibrated and weaponised – to manipulate people to advance specific agendas, especially of those in power,” wrote Bacalla in her introduction to her research.
Some scholars said they felt that due to a lack of financial resources, national news agencies were forced to rely on Western news agencies for content.
Professor Mandla J Radebe, an associate professor at the University of Johannesburg and director of the university’s Centre for Data and Digital Communications, said: “Instead of seeking to build an alternative source of news, the South African media followed its Western partners in muting alternative views by banning Russia television…
“This ban, and the South African media’s reliance on Western media sources, has implications for media freedom, freedom of expression, and journalism. It not only obscures the truth while driving a single narrative and propaganda, but also demonstrates the continuous evolution of media imperialism.”
He argued this in n opinion piece published in the Mail & Guardian.
The ANC, in its 51st National Conference Resolutions, noted that “media and communications were contested terrains and therefore not neutral”.
It said that the media reflected ideological battles and power relations based on race, class, and gender in the society, and some sections of the media continued to adopt an anti-transformation, anti-ANC stance, and were not accountable to the general public.
The party felt that content in the media reflected the interests of the upper elite in society as a result of commercial interests and advertisers’ demands.