Thinking aloud/allowed: Pursuing the public interest in radio debate
Lesley Cowlinga* and Carolyn Hamiltonb
a
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa; bUniversity of Cape
Town, South Africa
This article examines the controversy that erupted in 2006 when the South African
Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) was accused of banning certain commentators.
The ‘blacklisting’ saga surfaced differences in ideas and practices of publicness
among the contenders in the controversy and revealed that notions of the public,
public accountability and the public interest were contested. The research describes
independent newsroom practices conducted in terms of journalistic ethics and
professional ideologies, and shows that journalists assume a powerful role in
defining publics and calling them into being, as well as in orchestrating their
participation in public deliberation. This is a professional responsibility that is
recognised and defended. However, the practices associated with that responsibility
and the power to orchestrate the debate in particular ways are not critically engaged
within the profession. Just as the debate illuminates the concept of publicness
imported into journalistic practice, it also illuminates concepts imported into SABC
institutional practice which are rooted in a long lineage of national democratic
struggle. In the controversy, the two concepts chafed against each other, propounded
in each case by protagonists embedded in their respective lineages. The controversy
was thus more than simply a struggle for political control; it was a contest about the
meaning of democratic citizenship itself, rooted in differing but intersecting politicalintellectual logics.
Keywords: public sphere; orchestration; media debate; journalistic professionalism;
public interest
Introduction1
This article examines the public broadcaster’s radio programme AMLive and the
controversy that erupted in 2006 when the South African Broadcasting Corporation
(SABC) was accused, in the programme, of banning certain commentators from its
news shows. We look at the ‘blacklisting’ saga not so much to ‘take the temperature’
of the health of South African democracy, but to examine differences in ideas and
practices of publicness among the participants in the controversy and to consider their
implications for public deliberation in South Africa. We note that the issue surfaced
contested notions of the public, public accountability and the public interest, and that
these concepts were linked to the situational practices and political-intellectual
lineages of the protagonists. We argue that specific elements and dynamics of the
contest over publicness have local inflections that seem to be particular to public
deliberation in post-repressive regime South Africa.
In this article, we look first at the operations of AMLive before the
blacklisting, examining how the particular medium of a radio current affairs show
brings into being a certain kind of publicness. In addition, we look at how
professional practices associated with journalistic ideologies shaped the programme.
Second, we focus on a chronology of the contestation at AMLive and the SABC
around the Director of News’s veto on certain commentators. Finally, we look at the
reverberations of the blacklisting saga as it moved into other media as a controversy
and into the province of the law as a commission of inquiry and a court case.
*
Corresponding author. Email: ljc@icon.co.za
1
The public sphere and the media
Many theorists have argued that active public citizenship is vital to the health of
democracies. Jürgen Habermas (1989) identified active public citizenship in the
emergence of what he termed the public sphere, an imagined space between the
people and the state, in which the state is held accountable to public opinion. The
concept of the public sphere that he put forward involved the assembling of private
persons to debate, on equal terms and in a rational-critical manner, matters of
common concern. Habermas drew from it a powerfully normative ideal for
contemporary democracies (Eley 2002; Butsch 2007, Intro.). Whether or not some
form of the phenomenon of the Habermasian public sphere, or components of it, can
be found in contemporary democracies is debatable. Nonetheless, the operations of
modern democracies assume its existence.
Habermas problematised the relation of the media to the public sphere. Many
theorists of the media have attempted to describe this relationship. Some have argued
that the media have become the public sphere, with all messages, ideas, information
and opinion mediated through the various and complex operations and constraints of
media production. However, others have argued that the media are not the public
sphere, but only organs of it (as Habermas described their role [cited Eley 1992, p.
289]), and that there are other forums in which public deliberation can (and does) take
place. Be that as it may, there is no denying that the media are considered crucial to
providing a space for public discussion in contemporary democracies, although there
is much criticism of their ability to fulfil this ideal. Normative conceptions of the
media’s role in democratic societies resonate with Habermas’s conception of the
public sphere, notably in that media professionals adhere to the notion that the media
constitute a space in which issues of public importance can be discussed, holding the
state accountable on behalf of what they term ‘the public’, and that they understand
themselves to have a duty to fulfil in terms of what is understood to be ‘the public
interest’. They also uphold the idea that representivity within the media is important –
the ideal is that all views are aired and all issues of importance to society are
represented.
In South Africa, the media’s freedom to publish is protected by the Bill of
Rights and is measured against the legal axiom of ‘truth in the public interest’. There
are also a significant number of state initiatives designed to secure an environment of
public deliberation, including, inter alia, the transformation of the state broadcaster
inherited from the apartheid era, expansion and diversification of the airwaves and
community radio, programming designed to promote public reflection and
deliberation (such as coverage of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) and the
hosting of issue driven talk shows and edutainment programmes geared towards the
cultivation of citizenship (Cowling 2005). In other words, considerable attention has
been given to creating participation in ideas and issues in the public sphere through a
range of programmes intended to prompt public engagement.
As Carolyn Hamilton (2009) notes in the first part of this symposium, while
the South African situation seems to bear out the potential of post-repressive regimes
to exemplify the possibility of active and vital public sphere conditions and activity,
there are signs of limitation. One such limit flows from the fact that South Africa as a
modernising state seeking acceptance from a world community has been under
pressure to approximate a contemporary free-market democracy. This has
implications for the media. There have been concerns that the media’s dependence on
advertising for revenue leads them to target affluent audiences (historically white and
advantaged) over poorer audiences (see Cowling 2004). Such pressures have been
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invoked by government and the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC),
as ‘a real threat to media freedom’ (Harber 2004). The government critique of the
commercial media has drawn on ‘notable theorists such as Graham Murdock, Peter
Golding [and] Robert McChesney’ (Duncan 2003), who argue that increasing
commercialism leads to a homogenisation of content, the commodification of news
and the marginalisation of the poor and working class. Community radio, introduced
as a corrective, has foundered, as many community stations do not have the skills or
the resources to operate without funding from foreign NGOs. The ideal of the
community speaking to itself through the medium of radio has thus proved difficult to
implement. The SABC, the only organisation mandated to supply public broadcasting
that addresses the many communities that are out of the reach of commercial media, is
dependent on advertising for the bulk of its revenue. It thus faces pressure to target the
affluent audiences desired by advertisers, which have implications for news and
current affairs, as these are expensive to produce and advertisers are reluctant to put
commercial messages into serious content.
Other limits can be seen in the operations of debate and dialogue. Who
determines the groups to be represented and on what criteria? Who selects the
individuals to represent any demarcated group and how does that selection take place?
In addition, where representivity is taken to mean all sides of the story, who decides
how many sides there are? As Hartmut Wessler and Tanjev Schultz (2007, p. 16) put
it, ‘positions and perspectives are not always fixed a priori, but are developed in
discourse’. The diversity and quantity of talk in radio and television are invoked as
evidence of freedom of expression. But in democratic theory, the idea of
‘deliberation’ refers to talk that is specifically geared towards critique and the
engagement of complexity, rather than the expression of opinion, preference and
belief.
Such concepts suggest that intellectuals and experts should be active in public
debates, so as to facilitate grappling with complexity, or access to specialist
knowledge. However, complexity requires careful introduction, contextualisation and
sometimes mediation in order to make it accessible. Also, the idea of expertise should
not rule out the possibility of intellectual engagement by individuals not linked to
institutes or imbued with formal learning. To recognise the role of intellectuals
compels us to take into account the criteria used to admit intellectuals and experts into
the public domain, as they are given an important agenda-setting role in public
deliberation by framing and sometimes even introducing issues for debate. Historical
legacies of advantage mean that many experts are drawn from the ranks of old
established elites, while current affirmative action policies have concentrated
expertise in the hands of emergent elites and social inequality excludes many from
participation in the formal public sphere. This is a tension that must be noted and, as
we shall see, surfaces in aspects of the blacklisting chronology.
The operations of public deliberation have been complicated by disputes about
the ways in which debate should take place – an ongoing debate about debate. Direct
critique or criticism has often been decried as disrespectful. The sentiment that robust
debate is disrespectful was further complicated by interventions from the Mbeki
presidency, which both encouraged intellectual engagement and labelled criticism as
unpatriotic. Such interventions were interpreted as attempts to silence critics and mute
public debate. By the middle of 2006, commentators were proclaiming a crisis in
national debate and decrying what they regarded as the closing of the space of public
deliberation. It was also a time when the SABC, as the only institution mandated to
produce public broadcasting in a wide array of channels, had come under increased
3
scrutiny. A new board, appointed in 2004, endorsed ANC loyalist Dr Snuki Zikalala
as director of news (SABC News 2004), which was followed by the resignations of
key executives in the news division. These were widely interpreted as the outcome of
a political struggle between the new board and middle management (Derby 2005;
Naidu 2005; tvznews 2005). The canning of a documentary perceived to be critical of
President Mbeki, the broadcaster’s failure to air the heckling of then Deputy President
Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka at a rally in KwaZulu-Natal and its perceived bias towards
the President in its coverage of the presidential succession debate were cited as signs
of the broadcaster’s waning independence (Kadalie 2006). The 2006 blacklisting saga
was thus part of a series of controversies around the SABC and its perceived
closeness to the presidency, and part of an ongoing debate around the role of the
media in South African society.
AMLive’s kind of mediatised publicness
In 2006, AMLive was one of three current affairs programmes at SAfm, and ran from
6 to 9 a.m. every week day morning, in the high listenership ‘drive-time’ slot. The
average age of the listeners was 35 and 55% were black. The listeners were typically
affluent and educated, and this is a profile that is attractive to high-end advertisers.
However, although AMLive’s publicness was shaped by the economic and social
profile of the listeners, and its particular positioning within the menu of radio
offerings and timing in the day, there were other factors at play.
The first two hours of the show (6 to 8 a.m.) were made up of news reports
and clips, and live questions on air to experts or stakeholders. The After Eight Debate
component ran from 8 to 9 a.m. and was a discussion structured around the posing of
a question to a panel of guests in the studio, and to listeners who could call in their
views.
The news component of the show featured a high percentage of national news
and serious news that the journalists believed to be ‘in the public interest’, rather than
sensational or entertainment-orientated. The presentation style included substantial
comment and analysis. The presenters actively challenged spokespeople and the team
strove to ensure that alternative views and interpretations of events were included in
the line-up. One of the presenters, John Perlman, described the decision to introduce
the After Eight Debate as follows:
Some issues just can’t be dealt with in five-minute interviews. I sensed that our
listeners wanted to get more involved in the show. Most important, I have always
believed that South Africans are much more intelligent consumers of the media than
the media gives them credit for. And the After Eight Debate demonstrates that every
day (Perlman 2005).
While the news programme component called on experts, the debate component often
looked specifically for guests who disagreed on an issue. Sometimes the presenters
themselves played devil’s advocate, taking the opposite position in relation to a guest
or a caller. The After Eight Debate actively staged debate, aspiring to argumentative
and robust discussion. Yet things were not always adversarial. Perlman remarked on
the tendency for people on the show to speak less of ‘you people’ and more of ‘us’
and to seek solutions to problems, thus identifying a distinct strand of dialogue within
the debate. ‘People often phone in with suggestions, solutions. So many South
Africans seem to want to help’ (Perlman 2005). Perlman’s comments show us that the
presenters played a key role in constituting the show’s particular form of publicness.
4
The show thus called into being a public that was actively constituted as vocal,
engaged, challenged and challenging.
The mode of address of the show was carefully orchestrated:
This wasn’t just going to be a case of opening the lines. We wanted to structure the
debate around a very specific question. We wanted guests who would disagree and
debate. And we wanted the show to have pace. For some of our callers, used to a
more laidback format, it took a bit of getting used to.
‘What’s your point, Pamela? Why are you telling us this, Thabiso?’
An important part of the After Eight Debate, from the start, was that we would
always challenge the callers to substantiate their arguments. I’m not that concerned
about what people think, even if I don’t always share their beliefs. What I want to
know is: can they back up what they say? (Perlman 2005)
The presenters coached callers into making cogent points, answering challenges and
following distinct lines of reasoning, and pushed them beyond the expression of
opinion, preference and belief. Likewise, the presenters did substantial work in
contextualising issues, introducing experts and mediating their inputs in a way that
made them accessible to the listeners, and in facilitating the achievement of an
understanding of the points under discussion. While the presenters actively wielded
the conductor’s baton, the show did not screen calls and public representatives often
called in along with members of the public.
Orchestration of the public discussion was not confined to conducting the
interaction. The choice of topics for discussion was determined collectively by the
AMLive team. The After Eight Debate often picked up ‘topics with legs’ out of the
news stories. However, as Perlman noted, the team made active choices and
sometimes the topics were not directly linked to news events, but rather to general
societal issues, such as the question of why food prices never go down. He noted that
debates about social issues generated great responses, while sometimes the success of
the show hinged on the choice of guests:
The key thing was to get good guests and we did: Blade Nzimande of the SACP
[South African Communist Party] and KZN [KwaZulu-Natal] activist Ashwin Desai,
a Rhodes graduate who could start an argument alone in a room. I mean that as a
compliment to this interesting and passionate South African (Perlman 2005).
The capacity to argue and debate, sometimes fervently, was an important criterion for
the selection of guests, making sure that the topic was actively engaged from
contesting positions. It also reflected the journalistic injunction to provide balance to
an issue by reflecting both sides. The selected topics were typically intensively
researched by a particular researcher who had to find the ‘right’ guests (Perlman
2006). In part, the criteria for guests mirrored those for the experts selected for the
news section. However, because the second part of the show was not news, it was not
expertise alone that determined the choice of guest. Controversial guests were
solicited, as were guests who spoke thoughtfully from experience, such as a taxi
driver talking to transport issues (Perlman 2006), some of whom, along with some of
the regular callers, could be thought of as organic intellectuals or they could be
characterised as representing ordinary people over and beyond the voice of the callers.
Significantly, and in contrast to political talk shows in the United States of America
and Germany, civil society actors and community stakeholders were frequently
invited onto the show (Nimmo and Combs cited Wessler and Schultz 2007, p. 23;
Schultz 2006).
5
It was a public that, in coming into being, tacitly agreed to abide by what
looks very much like the operations of the public sphere as conceptualised by
Habermas. The show was a site of the shared critical activity of discourse. The
presenter also had considerable power to interrogate the ideas and information
brought into the debate by guests and callers. The liveness of the programme meant
that any inability to answer the questions, respond to points and mount a reasoned
argument was witnessed by listeners and probed by callers. This interrogative power
was also part of the earlier news segments, in which government functionaries and
other powerful individuals were sometimes called to account for their decisions in full
awareness of a listening public.
The radio debate involved what public sphere theorist Craig Calhoun (1992, p.
2) termed ‘quality discourse’ demanded of the public sphere, and approximated Geoff
Eley’s (1992) understanding of the public sphere as a space between the state and
people that allows for thinking about state/society relations that expand beyond purely
political conditions. It involved the kind of publicness embraced by Nancy Fraser
(1992, p. 111) as continuing to be necessary to ensure the critical functions of the
public sphere and to institutionalise democracy. The show fulfilled two of the three
normative pillars of democratically orientated public deliberations in the media
identified by Wessler and Schultz (2007, p19), viz. reason giving and weighing of
arguments in a climate of mutual respect and civility, and innovation and the
achievement of reasoned dissent. The extent to which the show achieved the one
remaining pillar, ‘equal opportunity for access to issues, ideas and arguments’ (2007,
p.19), is less clear. However, the show did allow significant access to diverse voices.
However, our analysis draws attention to a feature not discussed by Wessler
and Schultz as having implications for access, viz. the high degree of orchestration of
the show, some of which was dictated by the demands of the medium and some of
which was determined by journalistic practices and ideologies. In a host of ways, the
AMLive team played a significant role in deciding which issues went forward for
more intensive engagement and how that engagement took place.
As with the news section of the programme, the choice of topics for the debate was
often governed by a notion of ‘the public interest’. Significantly, this journalistic
norm is one that is largely taken for granted and undefined; it is learnt by journalists
through daily engagement with the news production process, through newsroom and
professional apprenticeship and socialisation, through negotiation and discussion in
editorial and ethical contexts, and in dialogue with the legal system. The idea of the
public interest is thus a fuzzy, but critical, concept at the heart of journalistic practice.
This core value was used to shape AMLive and its particular sense of publicness.
Mediatisation thus concentrates the power to shape the debate in the hands of the
media professionals in significant ways. Established professional criteria invoked by
journalists do not offer explicit guidelines for many of the choices made in relation to
the After Eight Debate; however, in practice, as research by Nazeem Dramat (2007)
shows, the choices were always made through discussion and, sometimes,
contestation among the AMLive team.
Thus, in part, the AMLive team set the agenda for debate in a manner
described by the media theories of gatekeeping and agenda setting. In gatekeeping
studies, media professionals have been shown to select and reject items for
publication in accordance with their understandings of what is required of them in
their professional and organisational capacities, rather than on personal preferences.
Agenda setting, on the other hand, has found that issues often find their way into the
6
media via a triggering event, just as news events often set topics for the After Eight
Debate.
An element at play in the blacklisting saga was already present before the
events: there was a substantial gulf between the practices and ideas of publicness
manifested in AMLive and those governing the operation of the SABC as an
institution. It is essential first to understand how AMLive was situated within the
institutional frame of the SABC, and to consider the different kinds of publicness
evident in the day-to-day procedures of the broadcaster and the conduct of its
executives.
AMLive was part of both the station SAfm and the general news gathering and
reporting division of the SABC. AMLive was produced by two teams, each led by a
senior producer. One team prepared the next day’s show, while the other came in at 4
a.m. and put the show together on air. There was a morning meeting after each day’s
show at which the next day’s ‘before eight’ news section was planned and the After
Eight Debate topics would be decided, and then the afternoon team set up interviews
and processed reports from SABC reporters and correspondents.2
The producers on each team reported to their team leader. These two senior
producers in turn reported to two executive producers who were responsible for
AMLive and other news and current affairs programming at SAfm. The senior
executive producer reported to the Head of Radio News, who reported to the Director
of News, who in turn reported to the CEO of the SABC. The AMLive teams also had
lateral relationships with regional and other news teams at the SABC, from whom
they sometimes took stories and inserts.
However, the AMLive team historically had significant autonomy in creating
the programme, as Dramat’s research (2007) showed. Decisions about the show were
made in meetings of the entire team, where differences of opinion were contested and
consensus reached (Dramat 2007). The selection of commentators and guests for the
After Eight Debate was a part of this decision-making process.
While the processes used by the news research department to source
commentators for these lists were thorough and systematic, and attempted to fulfil
criteria of diversity, expertise and representivity, the processes effectively privileged
educated black men typically based in institutions. Independent commentators were
rarely selected for the lists. The SABC research department criteria emphasised who
was speaking, and their structural or institutional positioning, rather than the merits of
the ideas being put forward (Lepere 2007, pp. 62–63). AMLive, on the other hand, did
not look only for accredited expertise or closeness to the topic, but also emphasised
the ability to debate and contest, as well as the importance of different positions being
taken on the issue, and solicited guests who could be controversial, could speak from
experience, could be representatives of people discussed or affected by the topic, like
taxi drivers, as well as those who might offer innovative perspectives.
Fear and loathing at AMLive: A chronology of the events of the blacklisting saga
Apart from the differences in selection criteria for commentators, discussed above, we
note three further areas of conflict: journalistic autonomy, decision-making processes
and notions of accountability. A chronology of how the saga unfolded shows how the
contenders in the conflict engaged in particular procedures to advance and defend
their ideas and practices, and in so doing mobilised particular forms of power.
On 28 March 2006, a producer was told by a senior producer who had ‘heard in
the corridors’ that ‘we are not allowed to use Karima [Brown]’, who had been
scheduled as a guest for the next day’s show (Dramat 2007). The instruction was
7
confirmed, without clarification, by the Executive Producer. At the morning meeting
on 29 March, the team asked for an explanation, but received none. Afterwards,
several producers called the Head of Radio News for an explanation (Dramat 2007).
Finally, one was told that the Director of News was ‘unhappy’ because Brown had
written an article on President Mbeki that had been inaccurate. Then, on 7 May, a
producer was told not to use independent analyst Aubrey Matshiqi on the show. The
producers redoubled their efforts to get an explanation, but received no response. On
25 May, they were told they would be given guidelines on how to select experts and
commentators (Dramat 2007; Mail & Guardian 2006).
On 20 June, the Sowetan newspaper published a report, alleging that four
commentators – Aubrey Matshiqi, William Gumede, Karima Brown and Vukani Mde
– had been banned by the SABC. The report linked their banning to their criticism of
the President. The same day, six AMLive journalists co-authored a letter to the SABC
CEO, outlining their concerns. At the morning meeting of 20 June, AMLive staff
discussed ways of covering the matter on the show, but could not agree. In the end,
they decided not to cover it. But the next day, the Sowetan had another story, this time
stating that businessman Moeletsi Mbeki had been blacklisted, implying that it was
because of his critical stance on Zimbabwe. The SABC issued an official denial,
stating that ‘the news division has not imposed any blanket bans on the use of
individual commentators by our current affairs programmes (Mail & Guardian 2006,
pp. 4-5).
At the morning meeting, the AMLive on-air team decided that they needed to
cover the story and that they would treat it in the same way as any other – interrogate
the interviewee and contest any untruths. This decision was consistent with
journalistic practice of covering an emerging story and driven by a professional
demand to avoid being complicit in the dissemination of false information. It was also
a dramatic challenge to the prevailing institutional procedures. This led to an on-air
dispute between the presenter and an SABC spokesperson in the before-eight news
part of AMLive, with the presenter asserting his personal knowledge of bans against
commentators (Dramat 2007). The print media immediately took up the story and the
dispute entered into a larger public domain. The CEO of the SABC then instituted a
commission of inquiry, headed by a former SABC head and an experienced advocate.
The Commission’s findings were not released to the public by the SABC, but found
their way onto the Mail & Guardian newspaper’s website.
This chronology shows that the instruction not to use a particular commentator
was perceived by the AMLive team firstly as a breach of journalistic practice, as it
appeared to amount to banning individuals who were critical of government. It was
also seen as undermining their journalistic autonomy, partly because of the way in
which it was conveyed and partly because of the already precarious interface of the
AMLive team with the institutional SABC. The team then attempted to restore their
autonomy by making the senior managers come to them to account for their decisions.
Had the senior managers done that, it would have had the effect of incorporating what
was initially an authoritarian – and possibly party-political – instruction into their
processes, possibly transforming the order into the outcome of a discussion. This
project was captured in the statement by one of the producers, recorded by researcher
Dramat (2007): ‘I come to work to practise journalism, not to do as I’m told’. As
Perlman put it: ‘Autonomy was not our primary goal – our autonomy was not an end
in itself but a tool to safeguard more universal values, like the independence and
professional excellence of the public broadcaster’.3
8
The persistent requests of the team members for an explanation of the banning
were also attempts to make the senior managers engage with AMLive’s decisionmaking processes. At AMLive, the team members came to their decisions about
topics, news and commentators through discussion, actively argued with reference to
‘the public interest’. This practice was disregarded by the senior managers and
institutional executives. The executives mobilised the hierarchical power of their
positions to ignore the pressure to account for the decisions and responded by
resorting to a bureaucratic approach: a plan to produce a formal list of criteria for
commentators for the SABC, which would be given to AMLive. This did not satisfy
the need of the AMLive team to have their autonomy recognised and their processes
upheld.
The notion of accountability also came into play with the Sowetan report. The
AMLive team then felt it necessary to put this issue into public debate through their
programme and to tell their public ‘the truth’. Once they did that, it entered into other
media as a controversy. The on-air exposure of the banning sent shock waves through
the institution, and the media more widely, because the journalists successfully
employed the power implicit in their own professional practice – they put the situation
before the public for discussion, thus circumventing institutional restrictions on their
practice. Using the interrogative power of the programme, they attempted to make the
SABC as an institution account to the public and, by so doing, rallied the support of
journalists in other media.
The blacklisting controversy
The print media took up the issue immediately after the broadcast, while the SABC
covered it extensively too – almost 86% of all coverage came from the public
broadcaster itself (Patel 2007, p. 65). The institution of a commission of inquiry and
the developments that flowed from it kept the issue in the news and caused another
flaring up of debate when its findings were not released to the public. They found
their way into the public domain by publication on the Mail & Guardian’s website.
The SABC went to court to try to compel the Mail & Guardian to remove the report,
but the judge ruled that publication was clearly in the public interest.
The controversy foregrounded the normative expectations held by the media
of their role in society, with their various understandings of notions of the public,
public interest and public accountability. However, researcher Shirona Patel notes that
the media commentators did not draw attention to their own practices of selecting
commentators and experts, and did not attempt to set out explicitly what criteria
guided them in the selection or exclusion of particular voices or issues, and in fact did
not acknowledge that the print media excluded certain individuals and types of
individuals.
It appears that the media took for granted that their practices were sound,
because they were based on professional values and practice. Implicit in the
journalistic position argued in many of the print articles was the assumption that the
exclusion of commentators was only a problem if it arose from a partisan political
position, but was acceptable if based on professional criteria. This corresponds with
the journalistic view of media as maintaining a critical distance from the state.
We see this idea at work in the contestation that arose around the fate of the
commission’s report. The journalists’ view that the commission’s findings should be
released to the media was motivated by their view of public accountability. However,
research by Rehana Rossouw (2007, p. 65) shows that representatives of the SABC
believed ‘public accountability is achieved in the broadcaster’s annual report’ and that
9
it is ‘entirely appropriate’ that the SABC’s major annual public reporting exercise is
to Parliament.
The journalists’ position reflects a belief that in publishing material in the
pages of the media or presenting it in the broadcast media they are acting in the public
interest and ensuring the public accountability of public institutions. However, the
institution’s views of public interest and public accountability reflect a paradox in the
constitution of most public bodies of that nature: a mandate to act in the interests of
the public, while being on the government payroll and being governed by boards
appointed by the state.4 Nonetheless, the debate is not adequately understood as
simply being about the difference between journalists accounting to the public and the
institution accounting to government.
Local features of public deliberation in South Africa
The blacklisting controversy draws our attention to contested understandings and
practices of public deliberation in the media in ways that illuminate something of the
specificity of the South African public sphere. As we have pointed out, there is
enormous contestation not only in the terrain of public debate, but about the nature of
public debate and the role of the media in public deliberation. One feature specific to
contemporary South Africa is the ongoing debate about debate, in which the ways in
which debate takes place, the right of certain individuals to speak or of certain issues
to be raised, are contested.
Another feature is the idea of public itself. The concept has a long lineage in
Western political thought, and in the form ‘public interest’ has a high status but weak
articulation in journalistic ideology in South Africa and in many other democracies.
The concept is contested and debated worldwide. In South Africa, although there is
broad agreement of the necessity of operating in the public interest, the interpretations
of what it is in practice appear to be more widely divergent than in more established
Western democracies. For the producers and journalists of AMLive, the concept could
not be separated from certain professional practices, which included journalistic
autonomy, establishment of what is in the public interest through contestation and
debate in the newsroom, reasoned explanation of gatekeeping decisions, links to news
and societal issues, and a placing of the facts before an imagined engaged public in a
mediatised setting. The SABC’s institutional position also endorsed a commitment to
the public interest, but did not see these journalistic practices as inextricable to it – in
some cases seeming to disregard these ways of doing things. The journalists and
producers of AMLive at first reacted by pressurising their middle managers to adhere
to the practices; and then by using the interrogative power of their show to reveal the
‘truth’, putting their loyalty to the profession above their loyalty to the institution.
The ‘journalistic’ position (largely supported by legal and judicial opinion)
imagines the media as a space between the public and government. The position of
the public institution, as articulated by the SABC management, invoked a majoritarian
position that imagined the public as represented by Parliament, through democratic
elections. In terms of this position, the state’s policies are enacted in the interests of
the people and therefore public interest and national interest are seen as coterminous,
rather than potentially, or even productively, divergent and sometimes in conflict. Our
aim in calling attention to this point is not to divert attention away from the possibility
of such a position being used in a politically expedient fashion by those in power, but
to point out its connections to an alternative intellectual tradition with substantial
appeal to those rooted in that tradition.
10
Our case study forces a review of taken-for-granted journalistic practices. An
assertive post-coloniality positions South Africans to engage critically with concepts,
such as public, with long lineages in Western political thought. Just as the debate
illuminates the concept of publicness imported into journalistic practice, it also
illuminates, in this case, concepts imported into SABC institutional practice, notably a
concept of public interest that is equated with national interest. As Chipkin (2007)
shows, this equation is itself rooted in a long lineage of national democratic struggle,
with particular Marxist and Africanist inflections, and a certain inhospitability to
heterogeneity. In the blacklisting controversy, the two concepts rub up against each
other, propounded in each case by practitioners embedded in their respective lineages.
The struggle was more than simply a struggle for political control over an important
ideological resource. It was a contest about the meaning of democratic citizenship
itself, rooted in differing but intersecting political logics.
Publicness, power and contending ideas about the nature of democracy
Our findings in relation to the blacklisting controversy have significance for how we
understand another contemporary issue, the tensions between the ANC and the
independent media which developed in the second term of the Mbeki presidency. In
terms of this tension the media view the ANC, and government, as using state power
to curtail freedom of expression. In many respects, the blacklisting saga is marked by
signs of such political expediency and the operation of power in that form. However,
our research suggests that to read the controversy only in terms of political
expediency is to miss the extent to which the SABC executives’ participation in the
controversy drew on, and found justification in, the logic of legacy ideas about
national democratic citizenship and sought to constitute publicness in terms of those
ideas.
Further, in terms of the tensions between the ANC and the independent media,
ANC media strategists draw on political-economy media theories to account for what
they perceive as the bias of the independent, commercial media. The nub of their
analysis is that the independent media represent the interests of the forces of market
capitalism, which they view as acting in their own interests in opposition to key
aspects of the ANC’s programme of development and its implementation through
government. Their argument is that capital’s ownership of the media influences the
choices made by the editors and journalists they employ and the commentators on
whom they draw. However, an investigation of the blacklisting controversy reveals
that even where the paymasters – in this case the SABC executives – explicitly share
the ANC’s understanding of nation and the linked national project of development,
the journalists act independently according to journalistic standards and professional
practices. They defend journalistic autonomy, news-value-driven topic selection and
the professional understanding of public interest in the selection of both topics and
commentators.
The research shows that journalists assume a powerful role in defining publics
and calling them into being, as well as in orchestrating their participation in public
deliberation. This is a professional responsibility and challenge with profound ethical
and political implications, a responsibility that is recognised and defended. However,
the practices associated with that responsibility, the power to create publics (rather
than to inform a pre-existing public) and the power to mediatise the debate in
particular ways are barely recognised and critically engaged within the profession. If,
as we have argued, the struggle over publicness is deeply implicated in shaping the
11
nature of democratic citizenship in South Africa, then the media have a responsibility
to examine critically and continuously their own practices.
Biographical note
Lesley Cowling is a senior lecturer in Journalism and Media Studies at the University of the
Witwatersrand and a research fellow of the Public Life of Ideas Research Network.
Carolyn Hamilton is National Research Foundation (NRF) Research Professor in Archive and Public
Culture at the University of Cape Town and a member of the Public Life of Ideas Research Network.
Formerly director of the Constitution of Public Intellectual Life Research Project and the Graduate
School for the Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand, she has published widely on
archive(s), public culture and the precolonial history of southern Africa.
Notes
1
This article draws on the work, discussions and collective thinking of the 2006 Journalism and Media
Studies Public Sphere Research Cluster at the University of the Witwatersrand, led by Lesley Cowling
and Carolyn Hamilton, and comprising honours students Nazeem Dramat, Refiloe Lepere, Rehana
Rossouw and Shirona Patel. Their research is summarised in the Rhodes Journalism Review, 2007, no.
27, pp. 62–65. We are indebted to John Perlman for his responses to our queries. Our thanks are due to
the Core Group of the Constitution of Public Intellectual Life Research Project and the participants in
the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (Wiser) Colloquium on ‘Radio, Publics and
Communities in Southern Africa’, October 2007, for their engagement with an earlier draft of this
article. It is one of a series of interlocked papers coming out of the Constitution of Public Intellectual
Life Research Project, University of the Witwatersrand. In some aspects it draws directly on material
from those papers and in turn feeds into their analyses.
2
Email communication with John Perlman, December 2007.
3
Email communication with John Perlman, December 2007.
4
While direct government contribution to the SABC comprises only about 7% of its income,
government is the only ‘shareholder’ in the SABC.
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