Cabinet/Sanef Indaba

Government input presented by the Minister in The Presidency, Dr Essop Pahad

1 Communication and social change

1.1 Role of information in social change
1.2 Openness as defence of our democratic gains

2.1 Results of research into pubic information needs
2.2 Tiers of information needs and responsibilities

3.1 The reach of the media

4.1 Founding Settlement
4.2 A National Agenda
4.3 Positioning in the National Agenda

5.1 Debating a relevant news agenda
5.2 Critical analysis and advocacy
5.3 Media self-consciousness and herd mentality
5.4 Vigilance, suspicion and cynicism
5.5 Challenges of a psychological state
5.6 Should we mind the facts?
5.7 Pathology of news

6.1 Skills
6.2 Facilities
6.3 Career paths
6.4 Diversity and representivity
6.5 Orientation towards a news agenda for development

7.1 What government communicates
7.2 Who government communicates with
7.3 Mediated communication

8.1 GCIS and departments
8.2 Government as source of information
8.3 Communication agenda for development

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1 Communication and social change

1.1 Role of information in social change

Changing our society for the better and in particular addressing the needs of the poor requires that the people are active agents in the process.

For that to happen communication between government and people is critical.

An informed citizenry is an essential guarantor of democratic governance. Their awareness of government’s policies and programmes as well as the strength and weaknesses in conceptualisation and implementation, helps to ensure popular engagement and to lend legitimacy to the process of transformation.

An informed society is able to define itself and its challenges, to identify its opportunities and obstacles, and to inform decisions on the deployment of national resources.

The freedoms in our constitution, particularly those of speech and the media, are there not for their own sake. They are critical elements of people-centred and people-driven transformation.

As such, the communication industry, even in instances where it may be driven by commercial interests, does have a critical public service dimension.

Apart from this need for effective two-way communication between the public and government, there is also another very specific interest that South Africa’s democratic government has in transparency and openness.

Our transition from white minority domination to democracy – a revolution in any one’s language – meant that the instruments of the apartheid system were inherited unchanged. Democracy depends for its progress on the light of day reaching into all the nooks and crannies of remnants of the old order. Without the probing enquiry of a vigorous media, it would be difficult to tear down the status quo ante, or to obviate practices in the new order that have the effect of drawing us back.

We therefore start from the premise that for this government, communication and information have the highest importance; openness and participatory interaction with the public should be the defining character of our style of governance.

The question of what information to provide and publish is not something for government and/or media alone to decide. It is a matter of profound public service.

GCIS conducted research in 1998 into what the public felt were its needs for government information. It used focus groups (63 across the country in every type of area) and exploratory interviews with community leaders.

The results painted a complex picture, with a multi-layered set of needs.

Broadly the concern expressed was for information which impacted on the lives of people and communities, whether it concerned opportunities for jobs, education and business, or information relating to services, housing, schooling, crime or community and sport facilities.

At the more privileged and well-resourced end of the scale, in particular white urban communities, the predominant feeling was that they had full access to media and were not in need of supplementary channels – and there was a tendency in any case to be distrustful of ‘government sources’ of communication.

Other groups saw channels other than the media as playing a crucial role. Urban African groups considered local councillors to be the logical channels of government information.

Residents of rural and semi-urban areas, to which national media were reaching only in a fragmentary way, felt themselves to have limited access to information and saw intermediaries such as religious institutions, schools and councillors as important. Direct face to face communication between government and the public were a commonly expressed need across these sectors.

The research made clear that the credibility of government communication is constantly tested by whether or not visible progress is being made in implementing programmes to improve people’s lives.

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2.2 Tiers of information needs and responsibilities

For government this picture presents a complex and tiered set of responsibilities for communicating different kinds of information in different ways. The emphasis is on information that impacts on people’s lives; for direct communication with government; and for communication methods and a communication infrastructure that goes beyond what the commercial media offer.

This creates an obligation for tiers of communication responsibilities:

• direct communication from government to citizen;
• communication at community, local and regional levels;
• through community and local media and the public broadcaster; and
• through provincial, national and other commercial media.

In all instances the judgment as to what information must be provided in these different spheres must be exercised against the needs of the public.

The media too face a complex and layered challenge. And the media like government must exercise judgment about what content to offer through the channels they have at their disposal. For the media this is within the broad and hallowed mission to "inform, educate and entertain". A conception of the media’s role in transformation is critical in informing that judgement.

With these needs as context, communication environment and infrastructure are of critical importance.

The South African media landscape is a fairly stark one, as the research cited in the MDDA Position Paper makes clear

• access to media is predominantly urban
• about 20% of the population is beyond the reach of FM signals
• about 30% read newspapers – though others may receive some sense of their content second-hand through intermediaries
• Internet access is restricted to less than 10% of urban South Africans (and approaches zero in the rural areas)
• even where there may be physical access, it is often impeded by illiteracy and aliteracy, as well as alienation both from the news agenda and ownership patterns.

In addition the trend of newspaper circulation in South Africa, as opposed to the international trends revealed by the World Association of Newspapers in their latest World Press Trends published in June this year, is currently a falling one.

What one also finds through research is that the efficacy of the media in reaching people is more limited than one might expect.

To cite an example: Probably the major political communication event of the year is the President’s State of the Nation Address. It is then that a concrete programme of action for the year is made public. It is preceded and followed by massive press interest.

A telephone survey done a week after the 2001 event (in Cape Town, Gauteng and Durban) found that amongst this metropolitan and relatively intensive media-using population, just under 40% said that they had heard the speech or seen or heard reports of it in the media or from friends or colleagues. In the small towns and the rural areas, judging by a national survey done a few weeks later, the numbers fall to 30 per cent and under 20 respectively – with the average for the country as a whole amounting to 25%.

Social transformation, informed by the needs and aspirations of South Africans sets the context for interrogating the issues of communication in a changing society.

To the extent that our society rests on a founding consensus to improve the quality of life of all, that must be the point of departure for all that we do, as government, as a society, as a Fourth Estate.

The essential elements of our founding settlement lay in the recognition that South Africans should seek to constitute themselves as one nation within a democratic system, on the basis of a common effort to eradicate the legacy of our oppressive, unjust and inhuman past.

It therefore included a common commitment to striving for a non-racial, non-sexist and democratic society from which the legacy of racism and its manifestations of extreme poverty, disease and ignorance had been eradicated. That founding, shared, vision is inscribed in our constitution and bill of rights, the terms of which protect us all and which require nurturing and consolidating by all of us.

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4.2 A National Agenda

Flowing from that founding settlement is a national agenda of reconstruction and development – an agenda for the total transformation of our society and for socio-economic advancement of especially the poor.

From all quarters of our society the success of such a programme is recognised as a necessity for the social peace and stability without which progress and sustained prosperity will elude us.

The extent to which there is such a national agenda is reflected in the fact that following the initial years of policy formation and the development of our institutions of governance, most serious political discourse revolves mainly around the question of implementation, not around the contestation of policy direction.

It is true that the content of that national consensus demands constant renewal. Nevertheless the fundamental equation remains uncontested: primarily the interdependence of peace, stability and social change that eradicates poverty and racial inequalities.

How does each one of us position ourselves in relation to this agenda? Government, as mandated by the people, has got the responsibility to ensure that the ideals of the Constitution are realised.

Its electoral mandate is made up of programmes in various areas of life, to ensure that the South Africa envisaged in the Constitution comes into being. On an annual basis, it sets out detailed programmes to meet this objective. This includes a legislative programme and series of actions that, in the estimation of government, are the critical things that need to be done to move towards a better society.

There are many areas in which media, as a corporate entity, will agree it has an important, and indeed patriotic, contribution to make. These include such matters as the fight against HIV/AIDS and, to some, the promotion of the country’s interests abroad. In this regard, the issue of public service responsibility arises sharply.

Shouldn’t the issue arise also in respect of programmes to deal with human rights education, the fight against racism, poverty eradication and so on?

But it so happens that, as we get into the concrete detail of the national agenda, the views of media practitioners on principled approaches to this issue vary. This is because media practitioners are not a breed apart from society; but reflect its many schools of thought.

There are those within the media who declare that the founding agenda has already been achieved, simply by virtue of the formal achievement of a democratic system. Secondly, some believe that the role of the media in covering government programmes is to demonstrate weaknesses and failures. Thirdly, to many, government is a den of intrigue and conspiracies, and its relevance in a news agenda is exciting titbits about personalities.

At the same time, many within the media hold views strongly divergent from these notions, and put a high premium on information for development.

There are these and many other schools of thought, some in combination. The question though is: in what balance are they found in the media compared to the balance within society at large; and how does this reflect itself in the news agenda?

In South Africa, today, how do we define a relevant news agenda? To ask this question is not to contest the mission of the media to inform, educate and entertain, nor to encourage a dilution of the role of advocate and watchdog. Rather it is to ask what are the critical issues that one would expect to encounter as the media plays these multiple roles.

The imperatives of reconstruction and development, nation-building and reconciliation, should define open and salient manifestations of media content in respect of these roles.

These are the issues which research, already discussed, found that the members of communities in urban and rural areas put at the top of their agenda.

And in defining the issues, the test is not that they should be dealt with from the perspective of government; nor that we should deal with them only when there is positive news to report. The point is: let us criticise when such is due; and if we have to fight, it should be about substance!

Will these issues of substance sell newspapers?

The Independent Newspapers’ weekly poll on aspects of the news agenda recently did raise interesting observations. Asked if people thought that mainstream newspapers were still white-dominated and overlooked "black issues", even a third of on-line readers (less than 10 per cent of urban South Africans and from more privileged and affluent sectors) thought black issues were overlooked and over 60% of others felt the same. And we are essentially dealing here with issues of development.

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Broadly, it can be argued that it’s not a matter of content being about development, but how it is treated and with what degree of relevance!

A more systematic and scientific content analysis has been carried out by Media Tenor South Africa. It gives a somewhat depressing picture of our news agenda as reflected in four mainstream papers (Beeld, Star; Citizen; Sowetan). While there are some differences in treatment, the prominence given to different issues varied little around these figures: Crime 20%; Business 10%; Public Health, Sport and Party Politics each 4%; Education, Culture, Environment, Energy and Gender each 2% or less. (Media Tenor Edition No.2 February 2001).

Similar questions might arise regarding the platforms which the media provides for advocacy and critical analysis. There is a strong impression that the slots which media reserve for commentary and analysis have become quite fixated with matters of personalities and personal image, with an abundance of advice on how some of our leading personalities might improve their media images!

Such has been the crescendo of this trend that though some still insist that "politics today is about appearance more than substance" (Jean-Jacques Cornish) second thoughts are beginning to be heard. Quentin Peel in the Financial Times, reflecting on the recent UK visit by President Mbeki, recalled that matters of state are indeed "not a matter of presentation but of substance".

To put it another way, should the critical force of our columnists and writers not have been directed at, for instance, the time it took for the Integrated Sustainable Rural Development Strategy (or urban renewal, or any other anti-poverty programme) to reach the point of implementation, rather than the preoccupation with the President’s personal character or the inner workings of his mind?

In other words, it is quite possible that there are failings of government on substantive issues that do not see the light of day because media pays scant attention to them. It would in fact be a rarity to find, say, a year-end review that identifies commitments government has made, and comprehensively assesses whether they have been met. More often than not, attention is paid to a skewed daily news agenda – at times with exciting stuff, but very little substance.

We are confident that government is meeting its commitments – but the point is that, because of a lack of substantive focus, the watchdog may be letting the government off the hook on critical matters of transformation!

A recent analysis of UK media explained a rather similar fascination with political personalities and the cut and thrust of rumoured splits and shifts. This, it was argued, was a consequence of cut-throat competition for circulation in a London with 7 daily newspapers and 4 Sunday papers. Besides, for most of the corps of journalists in these papers, the daily diet in their metropolitan circuits was political gossip rather than the preoccupations of ordinary people in their communities.

Cut-throat competition also leads to a herd mentality: easily, an angle to a story that excites but sheds little light, becomes a bone that each one wants to chew dry-white.

Some correspondent makes a big issue of the fact that President Mbeki would not be going to the UNGA debate on HIV/AIDS while in the US, and finds commentators who naturally say it would have been ‘nice’ if the President were there. The whole media herd then follow.

Even within the context of sensational matters on the HIV/AIDS issue, should the fact that the President was to visit a plant of the Merck pharmaceutical company not have made headlines? If the media believes itself on Mbeki and the HIV/AIDS debate, was this not truly ground-breaking? However, the previews of the visit on SABC and other media that followed its lead tell us: No, what is ground-breaking is the negative story that he would not be going to the UNGA debate!

At the other extreme there is the absence within television of any platform for critical analysis of current affairs. Where there is a semblance of such, one finds mainly coverage of the views of "experts" whose mindset is to demonstrate how wrong government is or can be. Often, many such experts are advocates of views government may have weighed and rejected; views that may appear rational in a one-dimensional sound-bite, but which would not stand the rigour of comprehensive reflection and the reality of trade-offs that attaches to serious governance.

South Africa – including the government – needs in the media, platforms for critical and objective analysis of its policies and performance within the context of the national agenda.

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5.4 Vigilance, suspicion and cynicism

One role emphasised again and again in moments of media self-definition is that of watch-dog.

One journalist wrote a few months back that the task of journalists is to tell the truth and the truth is always explosive, in other words, controversial. That this passed without comment may reflect the extent to which it does resonate with the conception the media has of itself as bearer merely of the sensational.

Is there room for celebration of success in this notion of news? If all news were bad news, do national sports teams never win? Indeed, within the context of the grave matters of social transformation, does government never succeed; if it does, should this be only grudgingly accepted, and often with a rider that to do so does not mean one is a lap-dog?

Media Tenor found over the twelve months of review referred to earlier that the "the news presentation in the four newspapers is more negative than positive" And lest this be dismissed as ignoring the possibility that the situation itself was objectively negative, the Sowetan’s treatment of public health was rated as more positive than that of others, not because it was saying the situation was better – but because it focused "for instance on efforts to combat the disease [HIV/AIDS]".

When this approach is subjected to criticism, the response usually is that media freedom is under threat. Yet a profound reverse process hardly gets noticed: where individual media practitioners seek to impose their own policies and norms of behaviour on public office-bearers. Attached to this is the danger that government could easily be reduced to indecision, for fear of what the media (more often a particular journalist or editor) will say! Elected representatives thus become prisoners of what is otherwise a deeply political standpoint of individual media practitioners.

If government criticism of the media is seen as a threat to media freedom, is the inverse a threat to democracy, given that public office-bearers are elected? In both instances, in the South African context, the answer is in the negative.

For us, the question is whether these things arise from factors that we can address together.

Could the imperative to see only truth that is explosive or negative have less to do with educating and informing and more to do with an attempt at entertaining and marketing in a competitive environment of falling circulations?

Perhaps the time has come for us to examine some of the profound ways in which the legacy of apartheid affects us. In the recent period, many of us have discovered how the apartheid government and its politicians engaged in systematic and cynical deception and manipulation of society, far beyond the shallow suspicions that we had. Such have been the searing revelations effected through the TRC process.

This experience could indeed foster a suspicion of all power, translating into a belief that any government, including the democratic government, is as a rule, bound to do wrong. As individual instances of corruption and inefficiency come to the fore, we then see in them confirmation of systemic duplicity that should be expected of all politicians and all governments.

Related to this, and at the other extreme is the disappointment of those who cherished the ideal of a state of freedom and democracy, which we subconsciously hoped will fall from the sky at the instance of formal liberation. Little did we know that it will require hard work; that movement to true freedom will have its successes and failures; and that imperfections will be strewn along its path.

The writer, the producer and the analyst are expected to bring these imperfections and failures to public attention; but more critically to see the wood for the trees. For, if we get overwhelmed by the imperfections, history in its qualitative movement forward will pass us by.

Over the past seven years, and more particularly the past few months, the mindset that assumes dishonourable intentions on the part of government has become the stock-in-trade of many media reports and analyses. The boldness that places assumptions above fact, or as an open basis of interpreting fact, has started to lace virtually every news report.

News reports such as: ‘Government today confirmed that it is prepared to ride roughshod over the feelings of Opposition Parties and the public… ANC MP’s voted in Parliament to pass this or the other report or legislation’, litter the news columns.

In many instances, the reasons for particular decisions of government and/or the ruling party are no longer seen as even worth mentioning.

In the past month, a number of editorials in a leading Johannesburg newspaper openly state as their frame of reference pronouncements of the Democratic Alliance – about fact or an approach to issues. Recently, a renowned news agency wrongly but deliberately quotes a government spokesperson as saying that legislation on monitoring of cellular telephones means that government intends to "monitor everything" in order to fight crime.

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There is another dimension to this. Media Tenor observes in its review that when the media "were being too critical, government spokespersons and editorial and letters in newspapers aimed at black audiences were almost unanimous in their contention that much of the criticism was fuelled by racism" (MT#2 p.1).

Should we mind the facts? Should we misrepresent them as tools to prove a particular point of view?

Of course this may in part be a result of a skills problem. What is certain is that the trajectory that starts from a presumption of negativity, and the inevitable stance that this elicits from government, will take us down a path none of us want.

It takes us toward the situation described by the respected American journalist Richard Reeves, in his book "What the people know: freedom and the press":

"We took down politicians and politics without pausing to think that maybe we would be down with them. If we are in decline, it is because we have fallen into the trap of ignoring what government does and focusing on what it has done wrong".

Unfortunately, the media seem to have a paralysing difficulty in confronting these issues. It has taken interventions from outside the media to induce debate within the media – for example by the Human Rights Commission and by the eleven black business-people who paid for an advertisement on the subject of government/media relations.

So the question does arise whether the media has the inner dynamism to correct itself, without external intervention! For, an institution that lacks such qualities is doomed to atrophy. Fortunately, such an eventuality is inconceivable, thanks in part to the value society places on freedom of expression and the media’s role in this.

Below, we cite just a few examples of the trends identified above.

The decision of the Nel Committee regarding the Minister of Justice’s statement about the Auditor-General is presented in opinionated news reports as an ANC decision without even a cursory consideration of the technical details of the decision. While almost each decision by committees and agencies is weighed up on its merits, here the presumption is that the ANC/government is hiding malfeasance.

Challenged to motivate why the overwhelming feeling among parliamentary correspondents is that the Ethics Committee should have set up its own forensic investigation into the allegations surrounding arms procurement and luxury cars, some give the honest answer that such an investigation would be accessible by "the public" (read the media) as it unfolds. Could this be that other investigators are harder to crack in terms of exclusive information, and thus only one major media house gets the scoops? From a narrow and selfish commercial point of view, perhaps this is understandable!

The angle given to a Sunday newspaper report of MP Ruth Bhengu’s action in sharing with Parliament and the nation her experience of caring for a daughter living with AIDS, was even more instructive. Her heartfelt plea that parliamentarians should not politicise the issue of HIV/AIDS was interpreted as an attack on President Mbeki. The introduction to the news report was again mindset rather than fact, to the effect that: ‘government’s policy on HIV/AIDS this week came under attack’ etc, etc.

Reflecting on Human Rights Day an editorial in a Johannesburg daily holds the democratic government responsible for the continuing poverty in South Africa. If apartheid in the past violated human rights, today it is this government that is violating human rights. After the local government elections, a Sunday newspaper editorialises that the results are explained by the petering out of delivery of electricity and housing (without enquiring as to what the actual statistics were). Recently, the same newspaper, giving a semblance of respect for statistics, quotes wildly inaccurate statistics of delivery in housing, electricity, water and telecommunications (all delivering 1 million units!).

More generally the presumption that government is making little or no impact on the lives of the poor – and even that things are getting worse – is so powerfully ingrained an assumption that it is the unargued premise for a vast body of analysis and interpretation. Statements that the poor are getting poorer and that inequality is increasing are offered without any statistical basis.

An article by JP Landman published in Beeld reveals that 75% of publicised corruption cases have come to light as a result of official action against corruption. Is the "real news" therefore that democratic South Africa fights corruption effectively or that this government is more corrupt than the apartheid colonial governments?

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As we seek the factors we can address we need to examine the conditions under which news and information is processed by the media.

It is common cause that there has taken place a juniorisation of the newsrooms. That there is a skills shortage is acknowledged on all sides. The weakness in investigative skills in particular is of especial concern. The situation is being exacerbated by the rapid turnover of staff.

Compounding the skills problem is a resources problem. That includes in many cases very little by way of research facilities. The drive for cost cutting puts a premium on "telephone journalism" and now "internet journalism" which do not require journalists to leave the desk in order to investigate the facts behind the initial reports and speculations.

The accumulation and deepening of experience in writers and producers is all too often cut short by the South African media industry’s culture to opt for management as the destination of a successful career path and the reward for excellence.

That background and life experience play a part in sensitising writers and producers to the salience of issues in the lives of their audience is nowhere seriously contested. Is the pace fast enough; is it steady enough?

Beyond the logistical questions and those of skills and facilities lies the fundamental issue of the content of the news agenda – to what extent are training and orientation aligned with an agenda for development in a changing society?

South Africa’s history, the communication challenges of transformation, and the communications landscape in our country set the context and agenda for government communication. They dictate a particular approach defined by content, audience, voice and infrastructure. Media form a critical part of the platforms for such communication, and government values the role of the media in this regard.

However, the media news agenda, and how this increasingly veers away from the information needs of the public, does pose the question whether government should place less and less emphasis on mediated communication. This is a trend in many democracies.

Government messages to the public must include legitimisation and popularisation of the terms of the constitutional settlement.

Citizens want information they can use: about issues regarding their freedoms and responsibilities; access to opportunities, resources and services; and how they can take part in changing their lives for the better. The starting point of government communication is how to enable citizens to take part in the process of governance.

Government communicates with all of society and, guided by its policy thrusts, emphasis would be placed on sectors of society that are critical for the transformation project.

Communication involves various intermediaries who transmit information and ideas. Besides the media, a variety of opinion-formers constitute a critical part of the communication chain.

The primary communicators in government are the political principals, assisted by communication employees. All public servants, especially those at the coalface of direct interaction with the public, are communicators.

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7.3 Mediated communication

The media is a critical means of communication – its reportage and analysis impact on the public directly or through other intermediaries. The MDDA initiative (and SATRA work) seeks to contribute to the transformation of the current media environment.

A special place in relation to government communication should be occupied by the public broadcaster: it should play an objective and advocacy role on the country’s developmental objectives.

Amongst the factors that undermine the achievement of an adequate news agenda for development are weaknesses in government communication. As in the case of the media, some are "in the mind" of government and some lie in objective conditions.

Government communications is also undergoing change with a large influx of new communicators still acquiring the requisite skills. Grasp of government policy in essence and detail is uneven amongst communicators. The logistical disciplines of availability and of responsiveness to enquiries need attention in many cases. So does the critical service that policy-makers need to provide: supplying the necessary information to enable communicators to do their work.

A reactive, and sometimes defensive, stance is all too common. If the media fall short on attention to facts, government does too little to make the information about government activities and progress available to journalists in a usable form. If the media focus on conflicting statements or speculate on silences, government should be bold enough to acknowledge responsibility. The complex process of governance, particularly the rationale behind policy decisions, requires regular briefings to the media.

If the media is to understand, and in its reporting reflect, the priorities and principal thrusts of government’s programme then it does need to be serviced by government communicators who are informed by and reflect those priorities and policy thrusts themselves.

There are many factors that affect the relationship of government and media and their respective assessments of one another. They include many logistical matters that have a critical impact on the production and dissemination of news and information.

But the starting point is not logistical. It is one about the standpoint that each individual sector and individual journalist or politician or public servant adopts towards the objective of fundamental change and how to get there.

Differences between government and media are to be expected. Where they reflect details of operations, they can be easily addressed. But, to shadow-box about logistics as if that were the be-all and end-all of the relationship, conceals the substantive areas of difference between government and some media practitioners, and among the practitioners themselves. It is deceptive and leaves the public none the wiser

South Africa does not face a problem of freedom of expression. Our challenge is how to use that freedom to promote positive change.