part of no part

The Brouhaha around political allegiances of journalists and senior journalists in particular has caused much hyper-tension and ruckus in the stratified environment of those in the media who pontificate from their ivory towers.  With so much too-ing and fro-ing with many good arguments in between, the intellectual challenge of sifting through the good and the bad of the arguments and to try to, at least for my own sake, make heads or tails of the contested notion of journalism, but more importantly of its relation to power, has prompted me to express my opinion on the saga. In South Africa, the media has historically been controlled by a small elite who in conjunction with successive colonial and apartheid states have colluded to manufacture a world view which would support and maintain the status quo. In this regard not much has changed. The press has both been an ally and an opponent of these successive states and post 1994 the dividing lines between who supports and ...

“ The ANC wants to get back this province, because they know what needs to be done ” [1] , goes the call to action of the ANC President Jacob Zuma as he walks the streets of the working class in Cape Town ahead of the 103 rd celebration of the ANC`s formation. Behind this brief and seemingly innocuous and innocent comment, lies two decades of failed revolution. Revolutions, as we have come to know and understand them, starting with the American and French revolutions in the 18 th Century, have essentially sort to address two central and interlinked demands, the right to participate in the affairs of the state and the right to be free of poverty and misery or in the words of Frederick Engels in Anti-During; “ equality must not be merely apparent, must not apply merely to the sphere of the state, but must also be real, must extend to the social economic sphere.” Neither of these rights were realised in the South African revolution, save for the “representatives” of the p...