Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Abbreviati Ons and Acronyms
- 1 Introduction: The ANC and the media post-apartheid
- 2 The relationship between the media and democracy
- 3 The media's challenges: legislation and commercial imperatives
- 4 Race and the media
- 5 Freedom of expression: the case of Zapiro
- 6 Social fantasy: the ANC's gaze and the media appeals tribunal
- 7 The Sunday Times versus the health minister
- 8 What is developmental journalism?
- 9 Concluding reflections: where is democracy headed?
- Eplogue
- Appendices 1
- Appendix 2
- Appendix 3
- References
- Index
1 - Introduction: The ANC and the media post-apartheid
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Abbreviati Ons and Acronyms
- 1 Introduction: The ANC and the media post-apartheid
- 2 The relationship between the media and democracy
- 3 The media's challenges: legislation and commercial imperatives
- 4 Race and the media
- 5 Freedom of expression: the case of Zapiro
- 6 Social fantasy: the ANC's gaze and the media appeals tribunal
- 7 The Sunday Times versus the health minister
- 8 What is developmental journalism?
- 9 Concluding reflections: where is democracy headed?
- Eplogue
- Appendices 1
- Appendix 2
- Appendix 3
- References
- Index
Summary
Gratitude for liberation should not mean unending gratitude to the leading movement in that process. It is very human to be caught in the seductive embrace of one's liberators, but it is irresponsible and shirking one's duty to continue to entrust the future of one's society solely to a party or parties associated with the liberation struggle.
The role of the news media in South Africa's democracy presents a paradox, a historically created conundrum: the South African media finds itself subjected to the ruling party's desire for more unity and consensus in the country's fractured society. The desire of the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC) would be met if there was a more supportive and loyal press but the press finds compliance with this desire out of kilter with its professional code of ethics, its role of holding power to account, loyalty to the citizenry, exposing abuses of power and being a ‘watchdog’ in the unfolding democracy. The historically created conundrum consists of the ‘logic’ that because the ANC led the liberation struggle and was democratically elected it deserves a more sympathetic press. But as Mamphela Ramphele has noted in the opening quotation to this chapter, it would be irresponsible to be ‘caught in the embrace of one's liberators’, and then arguably in support of a media independent from political control she averred that ‘we must guard against the closing of the mind and inward turning of the gaze that leads to tyranny … We need to know how open our society is so that we have a yardstick against which to measure South Africa's progress in creating an open society.’ Since 1994, prominent members of the ANC have, to varying degrees, conceptualised the media as an ‘us and them’, or in a matrix which positions the media as outside democracy. Yet the tensions are internal to, and inherent in, democracy itself.
This opening chapter provides an introduction which is thematically grounded in political philosophy. In their 1985 work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argued that democracy is secured precisely through its resistance to realisation, a foundational point which has been accepted by the key political philosophical works of the three authors whose perspectives have guided this book: Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler and Chantal Mouffe.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Fight for DemocracyThe ANC and the Media in South Africa, pp. 1 - 21Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2013