When the Establishment Uses Blackness to Sell its wares.

In a recent article espousing the heroic mission of the Independent Media Group(IMG) Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya, interestingly, not only acknowledges that the IMG has joined the establishment(after all it was Public/State money that funded the purchase) but plunges head long into a defence of the establishment and the IMG`s role in presenting the establishments narrative.

What is not as interesting, rather deceiving, is the juxtaposition that Moya tries to establish between it and the rest of the establishment media.

To appreciate the distinction I make in this regard it might require us to briefly consider what establishment means as Moya himself does not bother to explain to the reader what he means by establishment. 

Moya instead presents all the media, pre-1994, and beyond, as anti-establishment and itself as pro-establishment on the basis of the illegitimacy of the pre-1994 government, and the legitimacy of the post 1994 government.  He further decries the lack of understanding and appreciation on this point.

But establishment, as the word is used in the context of the socio-politico contests, does not merely rest on the legitimacy of a government or not. In fact, Moyo, despite his later claims to being a defender of “black majority rule” misses the point of anti-establishment critiques altogether.

According to Wikipedia, An anti-establishment view or belief is one which stands in opposition to the conventional social, political, and economic principles of a society.

So what is the conventional principles which govern our society and forms the foundation of the establishment in South Africa.

Socially, there is the high, if not some of the highest levels of unemployment and poverty, landlessness and continued dispossession of land and opportunities, with a government that is increasingly willing and inclined to inflict violence on those who protest and where striking for a living wage could lead to your death at the hands of heavily armed police force, trained and equipped to kill.

Politically, we have a democracy in which government acknowledges the huge rot which has set into the political and bureaucratic functions of the state, where opposition parties are forcibly removed from parliament and where communities who are affected by decisions reached in parliament are ignored, silenced and generally disregarded. A political establishment that continues to preference undemocratically appointed chiefs, remnants of an Apartheid past, who rule like despots over the well-being of large rural communities, often receiving increasingly large remuneration packages from the state and where there are mines operating on communal land, from mining companies as well, so that they can sell the land and birth right of the local communities.

Economically, we have an economy that is bleeding money to Multi-National Corporations as they shift the base of their profits and illicitly transfer profits from the country, denying the local economy the wealth it created. We have an economy that cannot create jobs, but which creates ongoing profits and which continues to create millionaire after millionaire, while those in poverty grow in number and desperation.

In short the establishment presides over a system that seeks to maintain the economic and social dispossession of the African majority, while allowing it the chimera of political control.

If this is the establishment of South Africa today, then this is what the IMG so unapologetically supports and to which it seeks to craft a narrative that provides legitimacy to the establishment.

It is after all a pro-establishment bias that it shares with most of the media groups in South Africa.

The red herring of locating the IMG in opposition to the rest of the establishment media is at best a quixotic distraction and at worst a devious deception. Much of the differences with the other establishment media groups and old-establishment political groups such as the DA, mainly centres around party political issues.

The IMG`s undeclared, yet hardly disputed, political support for the ANC is often at the nub of public disputes which erupt from time to time. Very few of these disputes involve fundamental challenges to the “establishment” view of the world.

Moyo obviously confuses the other establishment media groups` anti-ANC stance (most of it for sound reasons)as anti-establishment. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Moyo correctly points out that there will “be a protracted battle to influence South Africans on what to think and to think about”, but the irony is that nothing I have seen from the IMG suggests that their particular view of the world, or their approach to the establishment will be any different from what the other establishment media has offered the South African public to date.

Alex Carey, An Australian social scientist and leading student of business propaganda succinctly captures the disjuncture of the IMG`s position when he argues that “the 20^th century has been characterised by three developments of great political importance; the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy”.  

The connection between corporate power and government remains firmly part of the “general tacit agreements” of silence between the establishment media. This is of course besides the generally corrupt relationships that are exposed between black politicians and black business people.  

It was George Orwell who warned that “the sinister fact about literary censorship…is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced and inconvenient facts kept dark, without any need for any official ban. The desired outcomes is attained in part by the general tacit agreement that “it wouldn’t do to mention that particular fact” in part as a simple consequence of centralisation of the press in the hands of “wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics”

That corporate South Africa rules the roost in South Africa and that they largely determine legislation and compliance should come as no surprise to any street savvy media hound. Yet, through the control of the newsrooms , the control of what is deemed news and what is not, what is published and what is not, and the treatment of news in both editorial and news columns, the IMG has confirmed its honorary place among the establishment media as the first non-white media organisation.

Congratulations.