A perception has slowly emerged within our society that there is some war between the government -- or perhaps the ruling party -- and the media in general."
Such perceptions tended to become reality if not countered, explained or dealt with, the minister said.
"I want to state without equivocation that from where I sit and stand, from where I come from, such a fight should not have a basis.
from here.
What he is NOT saying here is: "There is a war on the media by the ANC!!! And I am taking a brave stand against the ANC, supporting media freedom!"
What he is saying here is: "People think the ANC is waging some kind of war on media freedom. Thats just not true. I am in the ANC leadership, I speak with authority. I, and the ANC, support media freedom."
Really, we are getting a bit hysterical about a problem that doesn't exist.
I do not think that we should be apathetic about media freedom. Where media freedom is threatened we should stand up for media freedom. The protection of information bill, for example, really does sound like a disaster. It sounds like it can easily be used to hide corruption or other problems in government and it can be used to jail journalists for reasonable investigations. That should not be the case, we must stand up to the bill.
And the media tribunal, my opinion is that it is probably too heavy handed. And also too open to abuse.
But having said that, there are big problems with our print media. The ANC's grievances are real. Even if I don't agree with their methods of trying to fix the problem.
As Sexwale says, there is a perception that there is some war between the ANC and the media. Which just isn't true.
And actually, the fact that the media are plugging this idea that this war is real is pretty telling of the problems with our media.
1 comment:
We chatted about this a while back, but I think it bears repeating:
South Africa may be "first world", but it's INCREDIBLY YOUNG as a "first world" country. We're insecure, and that's entirely understandable, even healthy for the situation we're in. We've never survived in a place where this sort of stuff happens. The USA has faced these challenges. The UK has. They survived. So when it happens, people just go "Oh, it's okay, it's just like that time in 19XX, we survived it then and we'll survive it now". South Africa is going through stuff we've never had to deal with before, and because we are young and come from such a tumultuous foundation, we're liable to be more concerned than less.
Sometimes, insecurity is the only sane and rational response to a situation: *particularly* one where you ARE unsafe. Our view of what "unsafe" is might be skew because we haven't adjusted to a world where we can trust those people on the other side of the tracks (and people on both sides of the tracks feel this way), but that can and will only come with time and experience. For now, we accept the worry and concern and dis-ease, because we see something of value and want to preserve it.
All of which, I think, means that in 30 to 50 years, this country will be amazingly strong and mature, but first we need to survive all this nonsense, and the fact that we over-react is FINE, in the same way as a smart kid who gets his first "C" result at school gets WAY too worked up about it is fine.
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