A book of essays that I co-edited with Stephen J Ward on global media ethics has just been published by Routledge.  The collection, based on the first Global Media Ethics Roundtable that I hosted at the University of Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS), was previously published in South Africa by Heinemann. The book contains essays from leading media ethics scholars in the North America, Africa and Europe, dealing with questions such as:

” Are there universal values in journalism? How would a global media ethics do justice to the cultural, political, and economic differences around the world? Can a global ethic based on universal principles allow for diversity of media systems and cultural values? What should be the principles and norms of practice of global media ethics?”

The second Global Media Ethics Roundtable will be held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, from 21-24 March – and I better get back now to working on my paper for that meeting…

Go on, I know you want to order it.

I don’t usually feel very much like defending Jacob Zuma. But after the Daily Mail‘s despicable reporting of his state visit  to Britain, I almost feel like I want to take a train down to London just to give Msholozi an extra scarf or something. Because it’s cold over here.  I suppose one shouldn’t take the Daily Mail seriously – after all, it was their columinst Jan Moir whose homophobic article led to a Twitter campaign leading to a record number of complaints sent to the UK’s Press Complaints Commission. (Not that it impressed them, as expected they dismissed the complaint, confirming that they’re a toothless club of press insiders).

But really. The Mail’s barely disguised racism is just too much too stomache. It carries unfortunate resonances with a long history of colonial discourse in which Africa is portrayed as a dark and exotic continent, and the labeling of JZ as a ‘buffoon’ is so close to ‘baboon’ it’s not even funny. Africa’s media image has for a long time been and continues to be that of a place of conflict, famine, disaster, tyranny, ‘big men’ politicians  – stories about Africa mostly enter Western newsframes when it’s bad news.

And when positive reporting is done about Africa, it’s often just as stereotypical and one-dimensional. The continent and its people are again often portrayed in simplistic terms, as happy, naive, childlike.  (Look at this Pepsi ad for the World Cup if you don’t believe me – oh, those vast, uninhabited plains; oh, those clever and cunning little African kids) Very little attention is paid to the ordinary lives of people, the way people struggle against adversity and also try by whatever means they can to hold their leaders to account.

The Daily Mail’s coverage of Zuma – and that of the British mainstream press more generally who have also paid disproportionate and isolated attention to Zuma’s private life without engaging in a sincere debate about polygamy, the human rights issues involved, or how Zuma has fared as a president – can be read against that background – a ‘big man’ from Africa, presiding over conflict, crime, poverty, not a politician (and a cunning one at that, who knows how to play the ethnic card), but as a naive, childish and a ‘buffoon’. Little is said about the way his presidency is also highly controversial in South Africa and his private life, his polygamy and his irresponsible sexual behaviour is also a topic for robust debate by the public and civil society. Zuma’s conduct may be indefensible, but our democracy is not. Back home his people and his party have been castigating him, but because they know how important he is as a leader and a role model – not because he is a simple African buffoon. And, by the way, if gender rights are so important to you, ms Rebecca English, why refer to Zuma’s wife as a ‘former bank clerk’ ‘whose generously proportioned figure strained at the seams of her gold shot- silk suit’? Sentences like those reminds one that Sarah Baartman too was once a visitor to Europe.

But the biggest problem with this type of journalism is not that it stereotypes, simplifies or insults. It is that it will lead to the type of rebuttal by Zuma which will just further strengthen his hand to play the essentialist, ‘tradition’ card at home. And once he plays the ‘culture’ card in that way, critical debate about his presidency and his practices becomes very hard to sustain without in turn leading to accusations of racism and Eurocentrism.

And this talk by the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie  on the ‘single stories’ that are often told about Africa, is also worth watching again 

Hello Africa from UZI MAGAZINE on Vimeo.

As a contrast (and optimistic antidote) to my previous post on poor reporting on Africa by the New York Times, here is an example of how it should be done – using thick descriptions, paying attention to people’s everyday lives, and going beyond the predictable script of Africans as victims. (And on the technical side of things the use of video is great too)  Yes, it’s from The Guardian (And by the way, as far as reporting from South Africa specifically is concerned, The Guardian’s David Smith in Johannesburg is always a good read).

This report looks at the importance of the mobile phone for journalism in Africa (or as Mirjam de Bruijn and Francis Nyamnjoh refer to them, the ‘New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa‘), drawing on the excellent work done by Ushahidi.

Not surprisingly, the report concludes that Africa is ahead of the West in making creative use of mobile technologies for journalism.

Sometimes The New York Times‘s reporting on South Africa can be really, really poor.

Take this article on the Day of the Vow celebrations at the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria.  The fact that a number of die-hard Afrikaners are still staring at a ray of sunlight falling on an empty tomb in the monument, confusing architectural trickery for a Divine sign that the land belongs to them, is conflated by the NYT correspondent Barry Bearak with a much more important finding from a poll conducted by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation that 31 percent of South Africans believe that race relations have not improved since the end of apartheid, and 16 percent think relations are worse now. (One could also look at the glass as half full to point out that about 50 percent said relations had improved.)

The IJR report is rather worrying, but to suggest that the widespread racist attitudes are only to be found among Afrikaners is cliched and flawed. Linking the IJR study with the Day of the Vow story (taken out of proportion in any case) is lazy, and provides a too easy fit with old stereotypes instead of the complex new realities. The most important one, is the persisting economic inequality – the worst in the world – the NYT report refers to only in passing. The impact of  these persisting inequalities – linked to the racial privilege of the past but also to post-apartheid macro-economic policies that have been enriching a few but failed the poor majority – on social identities seemed too challenging and complex an issue for the NYT to engage with. Last year’s outbreak of xenophobic violence across the country, surfacing again recently amid global financial insecurity, suggest that links between economic hardship and racist attitudes should also be considered in a wider context than just domestic identity politics. Yes, of course old-style Afrikaner racism exists, but focusing on the exotic devotees at the Voortrekker monument presents a red herring which will not bring anybody, especially the international readership of the NYT, closer to understanding the real issues.
But if domestic politics and attitudes are under consideration, perhaps a more valid question would be how many people actually thought about things like reconciliation on Wednesday and for how many this was just another day for South Africans to emigrate internally, withdrawing behind their security fences (as the satirical website Hayibo.com observed in jest), with outreach and reconciliation the last thing on their minds.

This means we are again subjected to the ‘newsmaker of the year’ type of stories. South African media professor Guy Berger correctly points out that the whole notion of ‘newsmaker’ obscures the fact that the news itself is a construction.  Afer all, ‘news is what newspapermen make it’, the media scholar Walter Gieber said way back in ’64. Some would argue that Gieber’s definition refers to an era before the new online environment where People Formerly Known as the Audience now have ways to influence the news more directly. But although South African news organizations are also increasingly adopting and adapting the internet  – Berger notes the South African online portal News24 which has asked the public to vote for their newsmaker of the year online – journalists and editors can still act as gatekeepers online, and wield control over news agendas.  And let’s not forget that in a country such as South Africa, access to the internet is still limited and skewed.

My problem with these type of end-of-year stories is not so much that they remind us of the year’s big events, or even that they hide the mechanisms and processes behind their own construction, but that they reinforce the view of news as that which happens to the powerful, the glamorous, the controversial, the fit, the beautiful.  Especially in a developing country such as South Africa, marked by huge inequalities, it is important to start thinking afresh about news values, perspectives from which stories are told and the criteria behind headlines. The Daily Sun tabloid in South Africa (about which I’ve written a book) has sought to shift the attention (not unproblematically, I should immediately add) to another kind of reader, the people Daily Sun publisher Deon du Plessis refers to as ‘The Man in the Blue Overall’. This is a start, albeit a flawed one, to shift the focus from away from the elite.

Berger’s perceptive remarks made me think that perhaps the whole ‘newsmaker of the year’ convention needs to be turned on its head. Perhaps news organisations should use this time of year to reflect on those stories they did not cover, the people that did not make the news,  whose lives were not deemed worthy of news coverage. Perhaps this would lead to a re-evaluation of news values in a developing context.

Let’s hear it for the non-newsmakers of the year.

The trailer for the upcoming Eastwood movie Invictus is doing the rounds on the interwebs, and already it is causing some debate. I agree with my friend Sean Jacobs’ take on the movie. You can expect a lot of PR fluff to hit the screens and the airwaves soon. I will reserve judgement until I’ve seen it, but the accents on the trailer look crappy and the schmaltz is dripping from every frame. Many prospective viewers will probably paint critics of the movie as sour spoilsports.  I don’t think the fact that the movie is of the ‘feel good’  variety is the big problem.(Of course the rush to a feel-good ending usually leads to the type of artistic license which skims over complexities and nuance). I was a rookie journalist at the opening game of the 1995 World Cup and I can tell you I still get goose bumps thinking about it. But the problem seems to me that the movie (like, presumably, the book by John Carlin on which it was based, which admittedly I have not read) privileges the white narrative of reconciliation – as if democracy was all about white people coming to grips with their own prejudices and – even! – allow black people onto the field of their most hallowed of identity-building rituals, the rugby field.  It would probably be less critical of the compromises made by the majority in the reconciliation process. South African rugby is still triumphant, 14 years after that game. But too many other things  have not changed either.