Restrictions on media freedom

Weblog

Jozi

9 August 2010

What should we do about the threats to media freedom.

To the editor of a national sunday newspaper

Further to your editorial on Sunday.

You ask what i [we] think of the State’s intention to impose restrictions on what the media can report and the idea of setting up a tribunal to ‘try’ journalists for contravening the now narrower definitions of free speech.

Briefly i say it’s not a good idea… it’s not even an idea that can really work at more length though I say as follows.

Well i suppose  what follows is a summary of what i think. It may not be what you expect

And you may not want to print what i think… It is probably not succinct enough for a society raised on three second sound bites. That is ok. I am simply responding to your request.

Enjoy

regards

Nicholas aka Blogroid

What should we do about the threats to media freedom.

Writing as a white man. I say do nothing.* [We have an obsession in our world with being so-called "white"... sorry... i know it seems arbitrary and random]

Writing as a citizen I say the threats threaten me.                                                        Writing as a writer I say that the threats disempower me.

Then I realise that the threat is not to me as a white man, because I am irrelevant.  It is not to me as a citizen, because I have already lost my rights, to employment equity* [* a law that says you can only be employed if you fit into a desired racial or gender or disabled work category... white men are at the bottom of the desirability list].

And thus I am disempowered.

Notwithstanding all the blather to the contrary.

And writing as a writer of unfashionable themes I have always been disempowered.

Anyway.

So frankly in those categories I am indifferent to the state of the media, since little of that which is to be curtailed is of practical use to me.

Notwithstanding: In my role as citizen… This is the stuff of nation building, not the stuff of revolution. This is a struggle between [so-called] black persons in the now no longer  New Majority… for control of the State… This is the ancient common struggle of the dispossessed against the rest.

The ruling party has seen the threat of a real inevitable alternative:  It knows it must, like Bob [the Roz] Mugabe,[a neighbour] act speedily, to restrict/pre-empt the emergence of the real alternatives, before they gain traction. Repression is in: democracy is to be redefined                                                                                                        As that which suits the ruling class, which is here to stay.

Writing as an economist: restricting media freedom makes for economic weakness,

Economic weakness is bad for employment opportunities. So as one who needs to work; and for whom work is not plentiful, media freedom curtailed is not good.

Writing as an economic historian: Media restrictions are almost always accompanied by economic decline…

Argentina has never recovered from Peron.                                                            Venezuela is reeling from Chavez.                                                                                    Castro staggered from his deathbed [this past week] to breathe life into Cuba’s 50’s retro-post-repression slump… North Korea murders sailors to command attention to its squalor.

Afrika… ? Afrika weeps still where bull elephants trampled down the grass to reveal the thin soil beneath.

“Freedom next time”… Maybe.

An aging polemic poet warbles  ‘China seems the counter example… ‘ So…. Maybe they have more media freedom now than during the great leap forward [or rather backward in the usual way of media constructed euphemisms].

Our time lines shorten as memory shrinks: abetted by indifference to reality.

For the rest…

What separates the winners from the losers in the great global game

is the freedom of all the media to report …

Oh we forgot! … These freedoms are being curtailed all over. The Middle East curbs Blackberries. Even in the great democracies

Like America and England and places in between freedom is in retreat; and guess what?

We have the Great Recession and the immanent ‘double dip’ and the real likelihood of ten lean years ahead with no guarantees that it will end. So much for embedded journalism telling us only what ‘someone’ thinks we ought to hear.

In all this we ask… What is this, ‘media’, that must be controlled… who does it represent? Where will the benefit fall: and where the cost?

So in my view… writing as a whole person

We the citizens are all disempowered by an indifferent media  intent only on pursuit of the latest buck, trend, fad, whatever that will keep the presses rolling on indifferent shores… presenting only what some faceless gatekeepers want us to see. Much of what we do get is inaccurate, incomplete and often badly written, sloppy and routinely rude, even arrogant: truth a momentary fragment on the stock market page. But that is ok… We have the right to ignore it and know too, that many things we should know are routinely ignored, as if by design, or the self-censorship of presumed correctness… or brought out only on special occasions, like prizes at the fair.

Certainty: The print media are in line for a thrashing by a tribunal

and so they will sell out [they have little choice… the people love their leaders]. And like mpimpis* [sic] they will take down the new digital media                           too: if they can; out of spite…. [The digital                                                                    media is in any event inherently reactive,                                                              responding to the tales promoted by                                                                                     the print guys.]

Contrarian: Were I the present govt I would be worried about                                      the fact that the Print bosses are pushing so hard against                                           this set of ideas [media tribunals, suppression of information Acts], knowing  full well that                                                                                                                                the harder they push the more likely the Alliance will dig in their heels                      in their now well worn reactionary ways. Being paranoid i would suspect their motives.

Why: The government                                                                                                                   by pulling this stunt stands to destroy                                                                                 their own moral                                                                                                                   credibility in the eyes of their offshore erstwhile supporters… Elites already struggling… who put their careers on the line for ‘The Struggle’:  The Hains, n others. There are many                                                                                                                    who are already disillusioned                                                                                                      by a perceived humiliating reversion to type                                                                     [that’s the problem with stereotyping] and to judge by the diffi –                          —-  -culties we have attracting investments, we will find the atmos                                         -phere even chillier when we alienate those of our former supporters                    who will now not care to admit any more that they once supported the democratic process in a place that has now fallen from the tree.

Do they care?

The Apartheid govt: discovered this,  eventually.

A lesson now lost: Remember the ‘50s, the 60’s? No one seriously

influential

considered the apartheid thing to be abnormal: impolite perhaps, but not really bad… was it?

Change as we know came slowly, till the ‘tipping point’.

The rest we celebrate.

The ruling Party should choose to assess how close it really is to that facile tipping point that demonstrates dammed, diminished moral rectitude, and invokes repercusions of an indelicate brand..

Truth: Ours is again a racist State, sorry to say.

We have laws that redefine through media

That affirmation is the new discrimination. Albeit we pretend it is not, our denial is no less than that of 1950 and brings similar embarrassment to those who proclaim it to be just.

The establishment and the beneficiaries loudly proclaim:

That it is right and meet that it should be. And so it seemed.

Black people cannot compete, they suggest, and need laws to protect ‘them’ because we [‘they’] have chosen the                                                                                                   Path of no to lo growth: and need to share a diminishing pie…                    Equitably.

Because we know that freedom and growth are soul-mates… and we are choosing to choose neither.

Question 1: Does this shift to repressive legislation indicate that key persons in the ruling party ‘know’ that economic stagnation is not only likely in a non-competitive environment: it is permanent and inevitable; and therefore that ‘they’, [the current ruling faction in the current                                                                      Ruling party]                                                                                                                                 need to corner whatever opportunities still can be wrested from                                the disaster represented by  two percent annual growth over sixteen years… a decade of AIDS denial…

and a failed education initiative that cannot produce                                                sufficient people necessary for growth…

Do they want the media

to point out that we are poorer now per capita than we were in 1981? Of course not: [and I am hence being naughty by spoiling the game with this evidence; and hence am obviously revealing a ‘racist’; sub-text/suggestion/implication/secret smug satisfaction… [choose personal prejudice as appropriate.]

Question 2: Does the ruling Party want to admit that they have given up on a dynamic open society… ?  The planned, Planned society proclaimed so loudly yesterday has foundered stillborn, on in-fighting and the delusion that societies can be planned.

Can those who promote this new repression admit that they see the inevitable endgame…  And are grabbing what loot they can before the steady decline in our fortunes becomes so glaringly obvious, that all the media clampdowns in the world cannot hide it? [ not that much can be hidden in a wired world… ask the Pentagon]

Synthesis: There is a wave of crafty disinformation being trotted out by those icons who would have us collaborate in the loss of media freedom… They are the siren callers; and those media interests that bow to their Medusa’s song [as they will. As they did before and have done again] will find themselves petrified and crashed against the rocks.

A muzzled media loses the only real tool it has … Credibility. The print media is already fighting its credibility death throes. This will hasten the coup de grace.

The State that promotes media muzzling, loses the only tool it has… Credibility.

Conclusion: Intrinsically there should be no discussion, no collaboration. The media cannot threaten democracy: free media are the lifeblood of democracy… Without a free media there is no democracy. Just as one cannot be partly pregnant: one cannot be partly free.

If those cohorts in the new post-Polokwane* ruling entity who see their path to unjust enrichment being balked by too much news about their aims and activities, too many stones being lifted to reveal the graft, corruption and tender fraud beneath, then they must act unilaterally and shame their fellows who died for freedom. The ‘media’ cannot collaborate in this betrayal of the people.

Postscript: Just in case. Flash forward:  Can you imagine a time when, like those past rulers, who ‘never supported Apartheid’ …”it must have been someone else who was responsible…” there will not be found one ruling Party parliamentarian who will admit to her/his grandchildren that “I voted to extinguish the freedom for which we fought”.

A luta continua

Advertisement

~ by blogroid on 09/08/2010.