Mass Media Complicit in Colonial Project

The Mass Media has been alive with reporting on the Rhodes Must Fall protests and have on the face of it been a valuable source of information which has served to not only educate the broader public but also to spread the spirit of the protest to other universities both within South Africa and abroad.

The vital role of the media has been reaffirmed and welcomed as the discourse between the old and the new, the Eurocentric and the Afrocentric, the progressives and conservatives and the liberals and radicals has been provided with increasing space within the pages of the mass media.  

The exchanges of intellectual barbs and the battle to claim the ideological and moral high ground has been riveting and entertaining, but it has lacked a focus on the role of the media in the colonial project.

Within the landscape of a constitutional South Africa, the media has quietly evaded any substantial interrogation of their complicity within the colonial project, while Rhodes, as a symbol of all that is wrong with colonialism, has been glibly marked as the “fall guy”. The media has welcomed the debate which focuses on a patsy while their own complicity has been ignored.

In their study, The Role of the Print Media During the Apartheid Era,  Edward Bird and Zureida Garda claim that their “analysis, based in a human rights perspective and making use of a close content and discourse analysis, has examined the role which the print media played during the apartheid era (and) conclude that this media, wittingly or unwittingly, often played a role in legitimising and centralising the system of apartheid”.

Despite the many brave souls who worked within the system and who often, at great expense to themselves and their families, sort to present an alternative narrative in the mainstream mass media, the Media of Colonial and Apartheid South Africa was generally found to be complicit in the legitimisation of an evil system which was declared a crime against humanity. 

Some journalists even apologised at the TRC for their role during Apartheid.

 So their complicity was confirmed, agreed and apparently forgotten.

However, much like Rhodes the fall guy, individual journalists cannot ever represent the structural system within which they operate. When considering the structural model of mass media, it shifts the focus from psychological phenomena of individual journalists to the larger social settings in which media organizations operate. From a structural perspective, mass media are conceptualised as an institution, or subsystem, that serves the social system as a whole.

David Pearce Demers in his book The menace of the corporate newspaper: Fact or fiction, argues that mass media influence, and are influenced by, social actors engaged in goal-oriented action such as businesses and political parties, and mass media messages are understood as the products of this interdependence. 

One of the central themes of the structural model is that mass communication of knowledge has social control implications. The structural approach integrates the concept of power, assuming that powerful elites, particularly economic and political ones, have greater power than other social actors to shape the direction and characteristics of social systems.

The role of mass media is thus in developing and maintaining the basic balance of power within a system, generally in favour of the ruling elites. Mass media play the system maintenance role mainly through two communication processes: feedback control and distribution control.

Thus the media in choosing which messages to distribute are wittingly or unwittingly controlling the narrative and preserving the balance in favour of ruling elites.

One example of their agency and control of the distribution of information in this regard is the recent press release from the Civil Society Coalition on the MPRDA. Although it was sent to most media houses, specifically the black owned ones, not one media house covered the press release. 

The question is why?

 What makes the gathering of over 60 communities from across South Africa, supported by  over 15 well known and respected NGO`s, including the Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference Justice and Peace Commission, R2K, BenchMarks Foundation, ActionAid, Oxfam Amnesty International , Legal Resources Centre, Lawyers for Human Rights, Centre for Applied Legal Studies and others, not newsworthy? 

Especially since they claim that current legislation is an extension of a colonial past, is unconstitutional and to make it even easier for the news outlets they even linked it to the Rhodes Must Fall campaign.

What or whose interests are best served by the exclusion of this information from the public domain?

Its certainly not the marganilised communities who gathered to call attention to their cause.

The media should not escape without scrutiny from their historical and contemporary complicity in legitimising the dispossession and exclusion of large and marginalised rural communities affected by mining.

The past is the past, but we can still write our future.


 Hopefully our media will play their role in bringing about a new inclusive narrative that does not repeat the mistakes of their colonial predecessors. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Selling the Family Silver: Power, Extraction, and the False Promise of Balance in South Africa’s Political Economy

Image
  Introduction: Davos , Washington , and the Pedagogy of Humiliation There is something quietly revealing about South Africa’s annual pilgrimage to Davos. There, amid the rituals of elite networking and the theatre of global consensus, South African leaders encounter the realities of power stripped of ceremony: conditional access, asymmetrical bargaining, and the expectation of compliance dressed up as partnership.  It is an experience uncomfortably familiar to those lower down the domestic hierarchy; mining-affected communities, the working poor, and those whose lives are shaped by decisions taken elsewhere and justified after the fact. The irony is not that South Africa is treated poorly at Davos or in Washington, but that its political leadership appears perpetually surprised when it is. When President Ramaphosa travelled to Washington and was treated as an inconvenience rather than a partner, some commentators rushed to frame the moment as an aberration, a function of Donald...
Read more

The Madlanga Commission Must Not Ignore the Billion-Rand Smoking Gun.

Image
    A billion-rand policing operation may have been guided not by crime intelligence or public-safety imperatives, but by a government apparatus whose strategic orientation has become increasingly indistinguishable from the corporate mining lobby and criminal interests. When MACUA submitted evidence to the Madlanga Commission raising serious concerns about the evidence that had emerged in the Madlanga Commission about Operation Vala Umgodi and the deaths in Stilfontein, the Commission acknowledged receipt, but its hearings have yet to reflect any engagement with the issues raised. Instead, the inquiry has focused almost exclusively on the Political Killings Task Team (PKTT) and the Ekhurhuleni Metropolitan Police Department . To an extent, this is understandable. The Commission was established in response to allegations by General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi that the PKTT had been disbanded due to improper links between senior politicians and criminal syndicates. The inquiry was b...
Read more

South Africa Must Defend Its Sovereign Wealth, Before It’s All Sold to the Highest Bidder

Image
  When Anglo American Plc announced its plan to merge with Canada’s Teck Resources and relocate its holding structure to Vancouver, it was not merely another corporate transaction. It was a seismic act of capital flight, the slow-motion exit of one of South Africa’s most historically powerful corporations, taking with it a century’s worth of accumulated wealth, expertise, and control over our national mineral assets. As economist DumaGqubule outlines in his recently released report, The Anglo–Teck Merger: A Global Power Play , this deal is not about efficiency or synergy; it is about jurisdiction. It is about where wealth will be controlled, where taxes will be paid, and where accountability will end. It is a reminder that, despite our constitutional commitment to economic sovereignty, South Africa still lacks the institutional and legislative backbone to protect its sovereign mineral wealth from transnational looting disguised as “global investment.” While Canada has built ...
Read more